Enhancement of the explanation of the triple-dot syntax in 05 maintaining.asc

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Assessment

Difficulty
1/5
Estimated time
Under an hour
Newbie friendliness
68/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
git
Domain
documentation

Research direction

Open progit2/book/05-distributed-git/sections/maintaining.asc around line 280 and read the surrounding explanation of git diff's triple-dot syntax. Revise the sentence so the order of the branch argument and three dots, and the explicit current-branch comparison, are unambiguous; confirm the example and surrounding text still agree.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

The sentence that describes the triple-dot syntax in 5.3 Maintaining a Project may be confusing

In the context of the diff command, you can put three periods after another branch to do a diff between the last commit of the branch you're on and its common ancestor with another branch:

$ git diff master...contrib

The command example makes it clear. Also the contrib is mentioned earlier in the text as the topic branch.

English is not my first language, so it could look more confusing to me. The "another branch" slightly does not suggest that it should be written before the three dots (my point of view). Also, "the last commit of the branch you're on" suggests that the current branch could be an implicit argument -- and it is not.

The sentence is located in
progit2/book/05-distributed-git/sections/maintaining.asc
line 280

Regards,
Petr

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