Re: friendlier names

[David Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com>]

on Tue Jan 27 2009, "Shawn O. Pearce" <spearce-AT-spearce.org> wrote:

> David Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com> wrote:
>> 
>> For example, why couldn't the "index" be called the "stage" instead?
>> That, along with knowing that "git add" was a synonym for "git stage"
>> would have flattened the learning curve considerably for me.
>
> Historical reasons...
>
> Waaay back the "index" was an index of the files git knows about in
> your working directory.  It made sense to call it an index, as like
> a book index it was a full listing of what's here, sorted by name.
>
> That's pre-1.0 days.  Like the very first version Linus ever
> released.  Aka commit e83c5163316f89bfbde7d9ab23ca2e25604af290.

I'm not saying "index" doesn't make sense.  It _still_ makes sense.  It
just doesn't make as much sense as "stage."  Index is a very generic
term; it doesn't communicate enough.

> Much, much later, over many months, the index morphed into what
> you see today, which is a "staging area", accessed by "git add".
>
> This was all incremental, in small parts.  Nobody set out to
> design a "staging area" or to have "staging actions".  Back
> when it was really the index you updated it with a tool called
> git-update-index.  Adding new files required the --add flag.
>
> People found --add annoying, so they wrote "git add" as a
> wrapper around it.  But modified existing files still had
> to be updated with git-update-index.  Then someone pointed
> out that add of an existing file and add of a new file are
> similiar enough that they should just be the same command,
> "git add".
>
> Only late last October at the GitTogether did we start to talk about
> creating a command called "git stage", because people have started to
> realize we seem to call it a "staging area" as we train newcomers...

Sounds like, from everything you've said, "stage" rather than "index"
would have been just as sensible in the beginning as it is today; it's
just that you have a much nicer interface for working with it.

> The tools are _all_ slowly evolved over time.  Nothing in git
> was ever set out from the beginning as a "this is what we are
> going to do".  The only part of Git that is like that is the core
> data structure on disk for the object store.  That hasn't changed
> since Linus switched from SHA1(COMPRESS(data)) to SHA1(data) for
> the object naming algorithm, and even that was done in the first
> couple of weeks.

OK, thanks for the history lesson.  It's good to know someone is paying
attention to these things.  Is there any movement toward addressing
them outside of GitTogether talk?

-- 
Dave Abrahams
BoostPro Computing
http://www.boostpro.com