Re: Considering teaching plumbing to users harmful

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:

> Hi,
>
> On Wed, 16 Jul 2008, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>
>> Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:
>> 
>> > 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?