Re: Considering teaching plumbing to users harmful

From: Stephan Beyer <s-beyer@gmx.net>
Date: Jul 16, 2008, 22:09 UTC
Message-ID: <20080716220946.GC18558@leksak.fem-net>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.1.00.0807161804400.8950@racer>

Hi,

Johannes Schindelin wrote: [...]

Show 8 quoted lines

> 
> I had the pleasure of introducing Git to a few users in the last months 
> and in my opinion, restricting myself to teaching them these commands 
> first helped tremendously:
> 
> - clone, pull, status, add, commit, push, log
> 
> All of these were presented without options, to keep things simple.

Basically I agree, but depending on the user's foreign SCM knowledge it could be useful to talk about some basic "low-level" concepts of git (without talking about the plumbing).

I mean:
 - objects (commits, trees, blobs ... in very short)
 - index
and perhaps
 - refs (at least branches)

I was told that before I've seen a first git command and I still think that was very useful.

Hmm, just recalling, my first git commands were:
 1. init
 2. add
 3. status
 4. commit
 5. diff
 6. log
 7. branch
 8. checkout
in this order, approximately. :)

(And I've used rebase before merge and I haven't used clone/pull/push for a long time.)

It seems I haven't touched any plumbing before I've started with GSoC :)

I also think that for a user it is totally irrelevant if it is plumbing or porcelain she is using, as long as it works. I mean, if I tought someone using git, I'd never use the words "porcelain" or "plumbing".

Regards,
  Stephan

-- 
Stephan Beyer <s-beyer@gmx.net>, PGP 0x6EDDD207FCC5040F