Re: VCS comparison table

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

Housing historical implementations seems like it would just lead to
out-of-date and non-functional examples.

I agree.  Although that ought to be rare in principle, given
that one advertised feature of git is that the plumbing is
supposed to be stable, we occasionally had to have to subtly
break things to improve plumbing and at the same time run around
to make sure that all the script users (both in-tree and
out-of-tree like Cogito, gitweb and StGIT) are updated.

quoted

 - Learn the itches David and other people have, that the
   current git Porcelain-ish does not scratch well, and enrich
   Documentation/technical with real-world working scripts built
   around plumbing.

I think this is a better approach. I think it also makes sense to
let people know that it's an acceptable approach to start new features
as shell and then have them mature to C (looking at the current
codebase, and some of Dscho's rantings, one might get the impression
that git isn't accepting new shell scripts).

New commands like pickaxe and for-each-ref were easier to code
in C, and cherry rewrite in C was really about how crufty the
shell script version was from the beginning (and there weren't
in-tree users of it left so it was not maintained at all but
thanks to plumbing being stable it just kept working perhaps
correctly but still horribly).