10.5 "Git Internals - The Refspec" misleading about what "refspecs" are

Open
#1,999 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness
48/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
git
Domain
documentation

Research direction

Locate the Pro Git source for section 10.5, “Git Internals - The Refspec,” and compare it with the rendered website or PDF. Review the title and surrounding text for the requested refspec terminology and definition, then verify that the updated section renders correctly in both book formats.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

bug
There's no existing/similar bug report.
  • I have searched the existing issues
This report is about a single actionable bug.
  • I'm reporting a single actionable bug
This report is about the ProGit book, version 2, English language.
  • This bug is not about a translation or old version
Bug covers book website/pdf
  • I confirm the bug is about the book as found on the website/pdf
Problem is present in the Pro Git book on the website?
  • This bug also affects the Pro Git book as published on the website.
Which version of the book is affected?

Source files

Describe the bug:

Section 10.5 Git Internals - The Refspec of the book can be misleading/confusing about "refspecs". I did not know/remember anything about refspecs last week, but visibly, the title itself has a couple issues:

  1. The section itself has several mentions of "multiple refspecs" as well as the "default refspec", so the title should visibly read "Refspecs", not "The Refspec".
  2. A look at git pull --help suffices to see several leaks (more than 5 references to refspecs as of Git 2.47). If refspecs were meant to be an internal, they are clearly far from having reached that status.

Of course, defining refspecs would help.

Steps to reproduce:

This does not report a behavioral bug.

Expected behavior:

This does not report a behavioral bug.

Screenshots:

No response

Additional context:

No response

Device

No response

Operating system

No response

Browser/application + version

No response

Dominant language
CSS
Stars
6.6k
Forks
2.1k
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from progit/progit2

All issues in progit/progit2

Similar issues

More Documentation issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.