Git very often uses the terms "object", "reference", or "index" in its
documentation.
However, it's hard to find a clear explanation of these terms and how
they relate to each other in the documentation. The closest candidates
currently are:
1. `gitglossary`. This makes a good effort, but it's an alphabetically
ordered dictionary and a dictionary is not a good way to learn
concepts. You have to jump around too much and it's not possible to
present the concepts in the order that they should be explained.
2. `gitcore-tutorial`. This explains how to use the "core" Git commands.
This is a nice document to have, but it's not necessary to learn how
`update-index` works to understand Git's data model, and we should
not be requiring users to learn how to use the "plumbing" commands
if they want to learn what the term "index" or "object" means.
3. `gitrepository-layout`. This is a great resource, but it includes a
lot of information about configuration and internal implementation
details which are not related to the data model. It also does
not explain how commits work.
The result of this is that Git users (even users who have been using
Git for 15+ years) struggle to read the documentation because they don't
know what the core terms mean, and it's not possible to add links
to help them learn more.
Add an explanation of Git's data model. Some choices I've made in
deciding what "core data model" means:
1. Omit pseudorefs like `FETCH_HEAD`, because it's not clear to me
if those are intended to be user facing or if they're more like
internal implementation details.
2. Don't talk about submodules other than by mentioning how they
relate to trees. This is because Git has a lot of special features,
and explaining how they all work exhaustively could quickly go
down a rabbit hole which would make this document less useful for
understanding Git's core behaviour.
3. Don't discuss the structure of a commit message
(first line, trailers etc).
4. Don't mention configuration.
5. Don't mention the `.git` directory, to avoid getting too much into
implementation details
Signed-off-by: Julia Evans <julia@jvns.ca>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
gitglossary documents Git pathspecs. One type of pathspec is the "glob"
pathspec, prefixed with the magic word "glob".
Regarding glob pathspecs, gitglossary says, '"**/foo" matches file or
directory "foo" anywhere, the same as pattern "foo".' That last phrase
('the same as pattern "foo") is incorrect. "**/foo" and "foo" are not
equivalent. "**/foo" matches foo anywhere, but "foo" does not.
This change removes the incorrect phrase from the glob pathspec doc.
Signed-off-by: Russell Hanneken <rhanneken@pobox.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
We presently use the ".txt" extension for our AsciiDoc files. While not
wrong, most editors do not associate this extension with AsciiDoc,
meaning that contributors don't get automatic editor functionality that
could be useful, such as syntax highlighting and prose linting.
It is much more common to use the ".adoc" extension for AsciiDoc files,
since this helps editors automatically detect files and also allows
various forges to provide rich (HTML-like) rendering. Let's do that
here, renaming all of the files and updating the includes where
relevant. Adjust the various build scripts and makefiles to use the new
extension as well.
Note that this should not result in any user-visible changes to the
documentation.
Signed-off-by: brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
