Re: [PATCH 0/2] Making "git commit" to mean "git commit -a".

Carl Worth wrote:

See? Git _is_ harder to learn, and a user really cannot learn it
without being careful about the index right from the very beginning.

I'm not so sure about that. I came from CVS / SVN, although I've fiddled quite a bit with other scm's as well. The two-step commit process of git didn't terrify me at all, and I had used git at least a month before I joined the mailing-list and found out that there's this thing called an "index". I knew about it before, since back then (June or July 2005) there was only git-update-index to mark things to commit. I just didn't worry about it but expected the scm to tell me if I was about to break something horribly (which it often but not always did).

I think the main thing people are having difficulties with when it comes to git is that it doesn't do things like other SCM's do it. Imo this is a good thing, because it allows git to be more powerful than other SCM's. Otoh it forces users migrating from darcs/hg/monotone/perforce/whatever to git actually read the documentation (and quite a lot of it), while hg -> bzr migrators use pretty much the same commands for pretty much the same actions. This makes users accustomed to not reading docs / trying things out before attempting Real Work(tm), which breaks down horribly when user expectations doesn't match reality. The simplest and usually most effective solution is to meet the users half-way, and tell them early on that this power comes at the cost of having to read the documentation and do the tutorials.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson@op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se