Evans: A data model for Git (and other docs updates)

On her blog, Julia Evans writes aboutimproving Git documentation, including a new datamodel man page she wrote with MarieLeBlanc Flanagan, and updates to the pages for several other Git sub-commands(add, checkout, push, and pull). Aspart of the process, she asked Git users to describe problems they had run intoin the documentation, which helped guide the changes that she made.

I'm excited about this because understanding how Git organizes its commit and branch data has really helped me reason about how Git works over the years, and I think it's important to have a short (1600 words!) version of the data model that's accurate.

The "accurate" part turned out to not be that easy: I knew the basics of how Git's data model worked, but during the review process I learned some new details and had to make quite a few changes (for example how merge conflicts are stored in the staging area).