Re: [PATCH] submodule documentation: Reorder introductory paragraphs

On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 3:00 PM, Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] wrote:

Stefan Beller [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

 DESCRIPTION
 -----------
+This command will inspect, update and manage submodules.

+Submodules allow you to keep another Git repository in a subdirectory
+of your repository. The other repository has its own history,...

The first line somehow bothered me, so I took a random sample of
commands I often use:

    git log
       Shows the commit logs.

    git show
       Shows one or more objects (blobs, trees, tags and commits).

    git commit
       Stores the current contents of the index in a new commit along with a
       log message from the user describing the changes.

    git diff
       Show changes between the working tree and the index or a tree, changes
       between the index and a tree, changes between two trees, changes
       between two blob objects, or changes between two files on disk.

    git push
       Updates remote refs using local refs, while sending objects necessary
       to complete the given refs.

I _think_ what bothered me was "This command" (drawing the reaction
"eh, what other command are you going to talk about in the help page
for this command?").  Perhaps

    Inspects, updates and manages submodules.

may match the style of other help pages better.

Sounds much better than my patch.

On the other hand, I probably would not have felt such a strong
"strangeness" if it were described like this:

    This command can help you inspect, update, and manage
    submodules.

I haven't analized it enough to say why it is, but I suspect it has
something to do with (my own) perception that "git submodule" is not
very essential to do any of these things (i.e. .gitmodules is a very
simple text file), but is primarily a helpful wrapper.

My perception is that the submodule man page similar to the subtree
man page tries to explain an underlying concept as well. The other man
pages you quoted don't do that as the concepts are explained elsewhere(?)

As a side note: In the Gerrit test suite I use the JGit implementation of
the config command to write out .gitmodules files. So maybe `git submodule`
can be understood as a specialized form of `git config`.

The description of "git config", on which I have a similar
perception, seem to match ;-)

    git config
       You can query/set/replace/unset options with this command.