On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 4:46 AM, Matthieu Moy <matthieu....@grenoble-inp.fr> wrote: > I'm lacking time to read and answer in detail, sorry. > > Junio C Hamano <gits...@pobox.com> writes: > >> "It must be done" is different from "any change is good, as long as >> it introduces more instances of word 'stage'". > > I agree. Something must be done, at least to remove the cache Vs index > confusion. I'm not sure exactly what's best, and we should agree where > to go before going there.
I thought we already agreed "staging area" is the best term. Some people don't, but that's expected. >> The phrase "staging area" is not an everyday phrase or common CS >> lingo, and that unfortunately makes it a suboptimal choice of words >> especially to those of us, to whom a large portion of their exposure >> to the English language is through the command words we use when we >> talk to our computers. > > I do not think being understandable immediately by non-native is so > important actually. To me as a french, "commit" makes no sense as an > english word to describe what "git commit" does, but it's OK as I never > really translate it. Even fr.po translates "a commit" by "un commit". Indeed. Let's hope this red herring is not brought again. > That said, having something that immediately makes sense to a non-native > is obviously a good point. Most non-native speakers, as most native speakers, already agreed the term "staging area" is best. > Another proposal which I liked BTW was to use the word "precommit". > Short, and easily understood as the place where the next commit is > prepared. And that proposal has been argued against already[1][2]. To summarize: 1) It's not even an English word 2) Unlike "staging area", it's not widely used in external documentation already 3) There's no sensible verb: "to precommit"? Moreover, in my mind a true precommit would have author, committer, date; all the things you expect in a commit, except that it's not permanent. A natural command that would derive from this concept is 'git commit --prepare', which would create an actual precommit. But we are not looking to introduce yet another concept, we are looking for a name of a concept we already have, and the majority of users have already given it a name; the staging area. [1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/197215 [2] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/168201 -- Felipe Contreras -- 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
