Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/2] Unification of user message strings

From: Vincent van Ravesteijn <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2012 08:47:46 +0100

> I had a vague impression that plumbing messages tend to be lowercase.  If
> it is not be too much trouble, it might be interesting to redo the numbers
> divided into the plumbing and Porcelain messages. Perhaps these "50%"
> folks updated both plumbing and Porcelain. Another possibility is that
> they tried to follow the local convention when they added a new one, or
> reworded an existing one.
>
> If we would be rewording, we would only be doing the Porcelain messages,
> so I am OK with either way.

It seems that the terms "Porcelain" and "plumbing" seems to be mixed up 
somewhere.

 From 'git help status': "The porcelain format is similar to the short 
format, but is guaranteed not to change in a backwards-incompatible way 
between git versions or based on user configuration. This makes it ideal 
for parsing by scripts".

 From 'http://progit.org/book/ch9-1.html': "....it has a bunch of verbs 
that do low-level work and were designed to be chained together UNIX 
style or called from scripts. These commands are generally referred to 
as “plumbing” commands, and the more user-friendly commands are called 
“porcelain” commands."

It feels like 'porcelain' means: "be careful, things break easily"; and 
'plumbing' means: "use all the force you want to get it into (a 
user-friendly) shape".

Second, to me it is not totally clear which strings are plumbing and 
which ones are porcelain. Is there a general rule to tell ? The 
command-list file says what the general intention of a command is, but 
often it's both plumbing as porcelain.

Can anyone help me out here ?

Vincent