Johannes Schindelin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Maybe we should decide on a common terminology before kicking out 1.0, and > look through all files in Documentation/ to have a consistent vocabulary. > And poor me does not get confused no more.
Glad to see you started the discussion on this one. I have a slight worry and suspicion that this might open a can of worms, but I agree we need to get this done. We probably would end up spliting the Terminology section in Documentation/git.txt into a separate "Glossary" document. Care to volunteer drafting a strawman, listing the concepts we need terms for, marking the ones we seem to use the same word for? You do not have to suggest which candidate term to use for all of them. Something along these lines... - The unit of storage in GIT is called "object"; no other word is used and the word "object" is used only for this purpose so this one is OK. - A 20-byte SHA1 to uniquely identify "objects"; README and early Linus messages call this "object name" so does tutorial. Many places say "object SHA1" or just "SHA1". - An "object database" stores a set of "objects", and an individial object can be retrieved by giving it its object name. - Storing a regular file or a symlink in the object database results in a "blob object" created. You cannot directly store filesystem directory, but a collection of blob objects and other tree objects can be recorded as a "tree object" which corresponds to this notion. - $GIT_INDEX_FILE is "index file", which is a collection of "cache entries". The former is sometimes called "cache file", the latter just "cache". - the directory which corresponds to the top of the hierarchy described in the index file; I've seen words like "working tree", "working directory", "work tree" used. - When the stat information a cache entry records matches what is in the work tree, the entry is called "clean" or "up-to-date". The opposite is "dirty" or "not up-to-date". - An index file can be in "merged" or "unmerged" state. The former is when it does not have anything but stage 0 entries, the latter otherwise. - An merged index file can be written as a "tree object", which is technically a set of interconnected tree objects but we equate it with the toplevel tree object with this set. - A "tree object" can be recorded as a part of a "commit object". The tree object is said to be "associated with" the commit object. - A "tag object" can be recorded as a pointer to another object of any type. The act of following the pointer a tag object holds (this can go recursively) until we get to a non-tag object is sometimes called "resolving the tag". - The following objects are collectively called "tree-ish": a tree object, a commit object, a tag object that resolves to either a commit or a tree object, and can be given to commands that expect to work on a tree object. - The files under $GIT_DIR/refs record object names, and are called "refs". What is under refs/heads/ are called "heads", refs/tags/ "tags". Typically, they are either object names of commit objects or tag objects that resolve to commit objects, but a tag can point at any object. - A "head" is always an object name of a commit, and marks the latest commit in one line of development. A line of development is often called a "branch". We sometimes use the word "branch head" to stress the fact that we are talking about a single commit that is the latest one in a "branch". - Combining the states from more than one lines of developments is called "merging" and typically done between two branch heads. This is called "resolving" in the tutorial and there is git-resolve-script command for it. - A set of "refs" with the set of objects reachable from them constitute a "repository". Although currently there is no provision for a repository to say that its objects are stored in this and that object database, multiple repositories can share the same object database, and there is not a conceptual limit that a repository must retrive its objects from a single object database. - The act of finding out the object names recorded in "refs" a different repository records, optionally updating a local "refs" with their values, and retrieving the objects reachable from them is called "fetching". Fetching immediately followed by merging is called "pulling". - The act of updating "refs" in a different repository with new value and populating the object database(s) associated with the repository is called "pushing". - Currently refs/heads records branch heads of both locally created branches and branches fetched from other repositories. - Currently, fetching always happen against a single branch head on a remote repository, and (a remote repository, name of the branch) is stored in $GIT_DIR/branches/ as a short-hand mechanism. A file in this directory identifies a remote repository by its URL, and the branch to fetch/pull from is identified with the URL fragment notation, absense of which makes it default to "master". -jc - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
