Philippe Vaucher wrote:

quoted

quoted

Yes, of course there should be a list of both positive and negative
tradeoffs. But I think the "overloaded" argument can be easily solved
by renaming one of the overloads.

And renaming one of a term also has costs, especially if it is one
that is in use in large amounts of documentation, both in the git man
pages, and in web pages across the web.

It's just impossible to change terms and have previous documentation
still be valid. Sure, you can list it in the "cons" section as an
argument, but it's not very convincing in itself because it applies to
pretty much any interface changes. I think the main idea is to
_improve_ the interface, which means rename things so it is more
consistent and so concepts are easier for new comers to grasp. We
could still support old terms for a while and eventually deprecate
them.

And that's exactly what I did in my patch series: start introducing the --stage
options along the current ones.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/236127/focus=236128

-- 
Felipe Contreras