On 18 December 2012 08:59, Junio C Hamano <gits...@pobox.com> wrote: > Andrew Ardill <andrew.ard...@gmail.com> writes: >> Even if the primary purpose of "git checkout <branch>" is to "check >> out the branch so that further work is done on that branch", I don't >> believe that means it has to be stated first. In fact, I would say >> that there are enough other use cases that the language should be >> slightly more use-case agnostic in the first situation. For example, >> someone might switch to another branch or commit simply to see what >> state the tree was in at that point. > > I've been deliberately avoiding the term "switch", actually. I > agree that it may be familiar to people with prior exposure to > subversion, but that is not the primary audience of the manual.
I don't have much experience with svn, so I didn't make that connection. Independent of svn usage, what is wrong with the term 'switch'? I would be interested to hear how translators communicate the checkout concept, as I assume the word checkout doesn't exist in many languages. For me, switching between revisions is a natural way of phrasing the action, but perhaps there is a better way of saying the same thing? >> Some people use checkout to >> deploy a tag of the working tree onto a production server. The first >> example in particular is, I think, a common enough operation that >> restricting the opening lines of documentation to talking about >> building further work is misleading. > > I agree with you that sightseeing use case where you do not intend > to make any commit is also important. That is exactly why I said > "further work is done on that branch" not "to that branch" in the > message you are responding to. Ah ok, I didn't pick up on that nuance. Your suggestion from earlier has, for example, "Prepare to work on building new history on <branch>" which *is* excluding that use case. Perhaps modifying similar lines to something like "Prepare to work with the repository/history/something from <branch>" or maybe just "Prepare to work with <branch>" would better encapsulate those use cases. Following lines would expand on what it means to work with a branch or commit, and the technical details of updates to the repositories current state. Regards, Andrew Ardill -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
