man pages

Absolutely true. It would be nice if each Git page started with a good synopsis and maybe a few examples. If those don't answer your questions, you can keep reading.

> And the Unix one-program-one-function rule says if you want to display a man page, you should invoke the man page displayer program, not the SCM access program.

This is only true for typical medium-complexity tools. Man is simply insufficient for more complex programs (most other scms, gdb, etc). At least Git still uses man! gdb and svn require you to use a different reader entirely.