paddyoloughlin's explanation of the index is a good explanation. I might add that if you didn't have the index, then you could not make a commit that contained

paddyoloughlin's explanation of the index is a good explanation. I might add that if you didn't have the index, then you could not make a commit that contained an add, a rename, and a deletion. If you think far too deeply about how Subversion handles these operations, it becomes clear that -conceptually- Subversion had an index/"staging area", too. Ferinstance, the output of 'svn help add' says add: Put files and directories under version control, scheduling them for addition to repository. They will be added in next commit. usage: add PATH... What's git's index but a list of changes that have been enqueued to be performed with the next commit? The big conceptual distinction between SVN and git is that with SVN you tie exactly one repository to a given working copy. In git you can tie multiple repos to a given working copy and (by default) one of those repos is stored in the same place as the working copy. Does that make sense, or is the index still somewhat-to-rather unclear and/or mystifying? (I mean, other than its kinda crappy name.) > ...can you point me at something not written by the git authors that explains what the hell is going on here and why? If "here" is "with git in general", I read the Git Book [0] ages ago, and combined what I learned from it with a fair amount of fucking around with my repo, and also with the contents of the gittutorial(7), gittutorial-2(7) and (parts of) gitglossary(7) man pages. [1] From looking at the ToC of the Git Book, it looks like chapters 1, 2, 3, and 7 would be relevant to your interest. Chapters 5 and 10 might be relevant. I can't offer any guarantees, as I last read the Git Book ages ago, and this look like it's a new version... the one I read didn't make any mention of Github. Though, if you were asking about something more specific, I'm happy to take a stab at answering that question once I know what it is. :) [0] https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2 https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2 [1] Even though you asked for things not written by the git guys, I got a fair bit of value from the official git tutorials. It's also possible that you've overlooked them, so I bring them up.