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Development Tools Git Basics Getting Started With Git Looking Back on What We've Done

Elizabeth Hicks
Elizabeth Hicks
44,877 Points
Posted by Elizabeth Hicks
Elizabeth Hicks
44,877 Points

Git Basics - "Getting Started With Git" Objectives - Feedback

This really isn't about this video, it's about the overall "Getting Started With Git" section. I am a very experience web developer and an well versed in GIT but my coworkers are not so I've been going thru courses that I already have a lot of familiarity with so that I have an idea of which ones might be useful to my co-workers when they run into problems.

In going thru this course I found that the working objectives were not very clear at times as to what the user was expected to do. The first one that asked you to commit said nothing about including a message so I did not include one and got it wrong. I of course corrected that but I noticed that the objectives for this section consistently lacked enough information to tell the student what was expected. My feedback for you guys is to add something about including a commit message in the git command.

Also there is a question that asks you to commit "all" the file changes and I missed where it said "all the changes staged". I think others could do this also and that using the wording "all" instinctively made me type git commit -a when you guys were really just wanting git commit .. I would suggest changing the wording of that one to not use all cause if students are getting that -a means all this will likely confuse them as to what they are expected to type. The question is worded like this "Commit all of the changes in the staging area to the repository." I would suggest you reword that to something more like "Commit the changes in the staging area".

GIT can be difficult by itself for new users to learn, adding confusing language will only slow the progress of new students grasping this.

Kathleen Roberson
Kathleen Roberson
2,706 Points
Kathleen Roberson
Kathleen Roberson
2,706 Points

I quite agree with this. Also, if I went back to the video to see what I missed, i had to go through 7 or questions again in order to get to the one that I couldn't answer. This was very frustrating.

3 Answers

Tommy Morgan
STAFF
Tommy Morgan
Treehouse Guest Teacher
Tommy Morgan
Tommy Morgan
Treehouse Guest Teacher

Elizabeth Hicks - thanks for the feedback! I will of course revisit these code challenges and see if we can revise them accordingly.

You're very right about the wording on the "...all the changes staged" question and we should try to be clearer and provide less opportunity for confusion there.

I'm not too sure about mentioning the commit message, though, as it is always a required part of committing your changes (well, unless you include the --allow-empty-message flag, but if you know to do that I'm assuming you know what you're doing. And I probably don't want to see your git repositories. :smile:). Because of that I'm inclined to say that it's an important part of the git commit syntax, and putting it in the question is a bit like providing the answer up front. If a student forgets the message, then there should definitely be some indication of that in the challenge's hint message - if there isn't, that's something else for me to look into :)

But that's just how I was thinking about it when we originally wrote the challenge. If there's still a sense that the question is ill-formed in that regard, or even worse if the course didn't adequately communicate the necessity of a commit message, we'll obviously want to correct that.

Thanks again!

Stone Preston
Stone Preston
42,016 Points
Stone Preston
Stone Preston
42,016 Points

yeah I agree with you. I did that course a few weeks ago and also had some confusion as to when they wanted the -a tag used and when they didnt.

Elizabeth Hicks
Elizabeth Hicks
44,877 Points
Elizabeth Hicks
Elizabeth Hicks
44,877 Points

I usually write my message in VIM so I don't do it in my git commit line that was more of what I was getting at. So at first I wasn't just automatically expecting to include the message in the commit line. After that I did start to just assume I should do that for the challenges.

Part of the reason I write it there is I like to see the list of all the files that will be included in my commit. And I usually just do commit -a and don't stage first unless of course its an untracked file. There are of course times when you don't want all the changes to go in the same commit but my comment about making it clear that a message was expected in the commit line was coming more from my own experience of doing it via VIM and not in the commit line itself.

Tommy Morgan
Tommy Morgan
Treehouse Guest Teacher
Tommy Morgan
Tommy Morgan
Treehouse Guest Teacher

Fair enough. We don't really have the capacity to allow for an editor to run in the browser right now to do it manually, which is why this required - I'll see if we can update the question to specify that.