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user-manual: create new "low-level git operations" chapter

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The low-level index operations aren't as important to regular users as
the rest of this "git concepts" chapter; so move it into a separate
chapter, and do some minor cleanup.

Signed-off-by: J. Bruce Fields <bfields@citi.umich.edu>
This commit is contained in:
J. Bruce Fields 2007-09-03 11:27:56 -04:00
parent 036f81997c
commit 1c6045fffa
1 changed files with 24 additions and 9 deletions
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Documentation/user-manual.txt
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@ -2963,29 +2963,41 @@ instantiated. So the index can be thought of as a write-back cache,
which can contain dirty information that has not yet been written back
to the backing store.
[[low-level-operations]]
Low-level git operations
========================
Many of the higher-level commands were originally implemented as shell
scripts using a smaller core of low-level git commands. These can still
be useful when doing unusual things with git, or just as a way to
understand its inner workings.
[[the-workflow]]
The Workflow
------------
High-level operations such as gitlink:git-commit[1],
gitlink:git-checkout[1] and git-reset[1] work by moving data between the
working tree, the index, and the object database. Git provides
low-level operations which perform each of these steps individually.
Generally, all "git" operations work on the index file. Some operations
work *purely* on the index file (showing the current state of the
index), but most operations move data to and from the index file. Either
from the database or from the working directory. Thus there are four
main combinations:
index), but most operations move data between the index file and either
the database or the working directory. Thus there are four main
combinations:
[[working-directory-to-index]]
working directory -> index
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
You update the index with information from the working directory with
the gitlink:git-update-index[1] command. You
generally update the index information by just specifying the filename
you want to update, like so:
The gitlink:git-update-index[1] command updates the index with
information from the working directory. You generally update the
index information by just specifying the filename you want to update,
like so:
-------------------------------------------------
$ git-update-index filename
$ git update-index filename
-------------------------------------------------
but to avoid common mistakes with filename globbing etc, the command
@ -3009,6 +3021,9 @@ stat information. It will 'not' update the object status itself, and
it will only update the fields that are used to quickly test whether
an object still matches its old backing store object.
The previously introduced gitlink:git-add[1] is just a wrapper for
gitlink:git-update-index[1].
[[index-to-object-database]]
index -> object database
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
@ -3016,7 +3031,7 @@ index -> object database
You write your current index file to a "tree" object with the program
-------------------------------------------------
$ git-write-tree
$ git write-tree
-------------------------------------------------
that doesn't come with any options - it will just write out the