#git: guidelines for getting help

We'll appreciate it if you pay attention to two big things: clarity and being (somewhat) friendly.

Making questions easy to answer

• Problem? describe what you wanted to achieve (a bit of detail can't hurt here), what you tried to make it happen, and how the result differed from your expectations.
  • We'll probably want to see what you did! If you have a specific problem with Git that might be easy for a more experienced person to see from your commands and output, it's a really good idea to copy a transcript of (the relevant parts of) your terminal session up to the point where something unexpected happened, and upload it to a pastebin. Any pastebin will do, but we also run our own called upaste – it will expire your upload after about an hour and it stores no personal information whatsoever.
• Confused? Point to the thing you're confused about, try and put into words your incomplete understanding of it, and we'll go from there.
• How to? explain your goal (a bit of detail can't hurt here), a bit of context for that goal (sometimes we can find a simpler/more elegant way to achieve the same thing), and what you've been trying/considering so far.

Try to use the right terminology to explain your question or problem. We understand that this is difficult when you're new to git (or even distributed version control in general)... but at least describe your issue as clearly as possible. You can find a lot of the official terminology in the git glossary.

Making people want to help you

• Beginner questions are fine! If you keep coming back asking for about the same thing, or start using us for completely replacing tutorials, documentation and such, we might get tired of your patronage fairly quickly.
• You're talking to volunteers. Calling people names will achieve nothing, except people will start making fun of you or ignore you. If something isn't going as planned, please don't take it out on everyone else!
• Feel free to complain, but be aware that the core developers of Git aren't usually active in the chat and you'd be better served raising your issues on the mailing list. Opinions on what's good and what isn't tend to differ, though...