gitless

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For some reason I still think about "untrack" as a way to stop tracking remote branch and not about a way to stop tracking some file. How about renaming it to "forget"?

It will be consistent with hg, which already has a better command line interface than git.

The opposite of forget would be remember or memorize. Are you sure you want to use gl remember file? I like the symmetry of track vs untrack...

track someone and forget is what I would use in real life. Google stats:

• track - 1,770,000,000
• forget - 937,000,000
• untrack - 193,000

so, most people on the internet don't even know that untrack word exists. )

You might stop tracking or forget to track, or even forget about it. Your native speaker feeling may be telling you any of that, and that's totally fine.

But I'd say since 90% of technical software users and developers aren't English native speakers, you may see inaccuracies in the choice of terminology that prevail. And in this light I think untrack is a better choice for the opposite of track than forget.

One could argue the command word choices for VCSs a lot, e.g. why call it commit and not push-local? Why call it push and not send? It's just a convention, and for gitless untrack seems legit.

I'm just adding my input to this open issue, not trying to convince you in any way.

commit is a legacy from CVS.

send is used for email. A better analogue is upload, except that there is no file.

On the second thought I would prefer to add files to version control, and track/untrack branches.

Since our conversation above I have written my own little super-versatile version control system, and took the opportunity to compare commands of traditional VCS for certain tasks. It seems all of them use commit, the main branch is called trunk, master or default (or has no default name as for Fossil), and the metadata folder is usually .<command> e.g. .hg, with the exception of Fossil, which uses a Sqlite DB .fslckout.

My project is not yet published yet publicy, but will be available on https://github.com/ArneBachmann/sos/

For tracking files I went with the default to track everything, or choose between Svn- or Git-like modes using add and rm. Thus you can use my system to branch offline even for SVN repositories or any folder at all.

Have you constructed a comparison matrix? Like https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=package-management I am sure there should be some already.

Not yet, but a good idea! The semantics, however, differ even for same commands a lot between VCS. I guess commit and branch and probably init are quite universal, while checkout, clone, switch, revert and update, merge or even pull and push may differ a lot in naming and semantics.