Re: [PATCH 5/6] Documentation/git-merge.txt: improve short description in DESCRIPTION

Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] writes:

Sergey Organov [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

OK, I see. So, what is the best way to handle this? Immediately follow
content change patch with another patch that only re-flows?

Or no reflowing at all.

quoted

quoted

the parents".  I do not know if the updated phrasing is better.  The
"name" in the original was meant to be a short-hand for "object name",
and I would support a change to spell it out to clarify; "reference"
can be a vague word that can mean different things in Git, and when
the word is given without context, most Git people would think that
the word refers to "refs", but that is definitely not what the new
commit records, so...

I won't insist on the change, but "name" sounded wrong to me, and
"reference" was most general term I was able to come up with in this
context.
...
Last, if "reference" is not good enough and we get to internals anyway,
why not say SHA1 then?

Because that is still colloquial? I think s/name/object name/ is a
sensible change, but not s/name/reference/.

No, "reference" is more sensible here than any of "name", "object name",
or "SHA-1", the same way as here:

$ git help glossary
[...]
chain
        A list of objects, where each object in the list contains a
        reference to its successor (for example, the successor of a
        commit could be one of its parents).
[...]
$

The resulting merge commit is an origin for 2 chains, so it stores 2
references to its successors. No need to be aware of any [object] names
to understand all this.

-- Sergey