Re: base

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org,
>     miles@gnu.org
> Date: Thu, 26 Aug 2010 01:09:01 +0900
> 
> For git, it's in the Community Book,
> http://book.git-scm.com/1_the_git_object_model.html, and following
> chapters.
> [...]
> For Mercurial, the structure of a branch and its associated databases
> is described in The Book,
> http://hgbook.red-bean.com/read/behind-the-scenes.html.

That's not a "mental model", at least not by your definition (nor by
mine, should I guess what that is).  That's the data structures part
of the internals manual.

I don't see how users would need to know that stuff in order to be
able to use the tool safely and efficiently.  It's like saying that
Emacs users need to know how Lisp data types are implemented or what
is the glyph matrix, in order to make good _use_ of Emacs (as opposed
to _extend__ it).  Sure, it's nice to know all that, but it isn't (and
shouldn't) be necessary for a user.  If you want to _extend_ the tool,
then yes, you'd need this and some more.

> I don't think any such thing exists for bzr.

http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/bzr.2.2/developers/overview.html and
other docs in that area comes close, maybe.  But that stuff is
rightfully in the developers' department, IMO.

> BTW, I have zero sympathy for the point of view that printed books and
> HTML don't count as documentation unless they're distributed with the
> program.

Well, we disagree, then.