Re: Considering teaching plumbing to users harmful

Johannes Schindelin [off-list ref] writes:

Hi,

On Wed, 16 Jul 2008, Junio C Hamano wrote:

quoted

Johannes Schindelin [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

Am I the only one who deems teaching plumbing to users ("I like it raw!  
So I teach it the same way!") harmful?

I think that justification is harmful.

More productive way to think about it is to identify cases where we 
_need_ to go down to combination of the plumbing commands in our daily 
workflow, with today's command set.  That would give us a good 
indication that some Porcelain may need to be enhanced.

An example. I find myself running "git read-tree -m -u $another_state" 
while redoing a series inside a "rebase -i" session to move commit 
boundaries.  There may need an insn that says "use that tree" instead of 
"edit" and running "read-tree -m -u" by hand.  This does not bother me 
too much, but there probably are other examples.

Another example.  I often run "git ls-files -u" while looking at which 
paths are conflicting.  ls-files is classified as plumbing, but it does 
not bother me as much as having to see the staged long object names in 
this output.  Other people, however, might find it yucky, and we might 
want "git merge --unmerged" or something that lists the paths (and only 
paths, no stage information) that still have conflicts.

I agree that if you know Git internals -- and you and me do -- it comes in 
_right_ handy to know the 100+ commands with many options by heart.

However, my point was about telling users, especially new ones.

Perhaps you did not read my first paragraph?