[larusso]

Nice article. What is interesting to me is the reactions to articles like this. Not the fact that the git internals are not widely known, I mean that is true for nearly any more complicated topic. In this case I mean the fact that this is actually well documented.

Don’t get me wrong. I think articles like these help a lot to demystify git and I believe it makes the tool easier to use and reason with when one knows what it does. But why is nobody finding or reading the later chapters in the docs?

https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Internals-Git-Objects

[avestura]

Creating a Git commit using low-level commands was always something I wanted to do, but I never found the time to really deepen my knowledge of Git. I have actually googled if I could find a blog post or something in this topic, but I've failed to find one. Finally, I got the chance, and for the past couple of weekends, I’ve been reading the Pro Git book (which it seems it's the same content as git-scm.com/book). I believe it’s a good practice to write a blog post about a topic after finishing a book (teaching is a good way of submitting knowledge in memory). To my surprise, creating a Git commit using plumbing commands was already covered in the final chapters of the book. I thought it would be a good idea to simplify that process and write a blog post which can be read under 10 minutes, allowing those who haven’t read the book yet (like myself in the past) to get a basic understanding of what Git is doing under the hood.

> But why is nobody finding or reading the later chapters in the docs?

I think to read the latest chapter of a book, one usually needs to read the earlier ones too. I personally don't jump directly to the internals when I want to read about something, because I'd then assume I am missing a lot of context and background.

[ErikBjare]

I haven't read a "book" like this chapter-by-chapter since I first learned Python by reading the docs.

[masklinn]

> But why is nobody finding or reading the later chapters in the docs?

Because most people don’t ever read the book period. 90% of users follow a basic tutorial or instruction sheet to get the five commands they’ll use by rote and go no further.

And, separately, the internals section of the book are mostly uselessly shallow, so if you start digging into that you quickly forget that the book even has one such section.