Subject: Re: Considering teaching plumbing to users harmful

From: Theodore Tso <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2008 18:49:54 -0400

On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 12:28:27AM +0200, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Wed, 16 Jul 2008, Avery Pennarun wrote:
> 
> > I find it interesting how git usability discussions tend to go.
> 
> I find it not interesting at all, even slightly annoying, that I cannot 
> seem to start a perfectly valid discussion about advocating porcelain, and 
> trying to even avoid mentioning plumbing in user-visible documentation, 
> without somebody highjacking the thread to talk about svn.

I've already said I agree with you, but maybe it would be helpful if
you focused the discussion a little more with a concrete suggestion
about how we could improve the user-visible documentation.  For
example, it is already the case that "git help" only shows porcelain
commands, that has been a big step forward.

So a concrete suggestion might be to move the list of plumbing
commands from the top-level git man page to a "git-plumbing" man page.

I'll note that the git user manual is pretty good about avoiding the
use of git plumbing commands.  It's not until Chapter 9, "Low Level
Git Commands" that it start going into the plumbing.  (There are a
couple of mentions of git rev-parse before chapter 9, but that's about
it that I could find).

Was there other git documentation where you think there is too many
references to git plumbing?

						- Ted