Re: Considering teaching plumbing to users harmful

From: Stephan Beyer <s-beyer@gmx.net>
Date: Jul 17, 2008, 01:01 UTC
Message-ID: <20080717010115.GD18558@leksak.fem-net>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.1.00.0807170120170.4318@eeepc-johanness>

Hi,

Johannes Schindelin wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> Hi,
> 
> On Thu, 17 Jul 2008, Stephan Beyer wrote:
> 
> > 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".
> 
> So you would say that remembering the name "rev-parse" is just as easy as 
> remembering "show"?

"show" is an intuitional name, "rev-parse" is not.[1] But that wasn't my point. The point was, that it is not important to a user whether the tool is called "plumbing" or "porcelain"; that these terms have no value for the user, if she just wants to get a job done.

Of course, "usually" porcelain is more helpful and as I've said (or at least tried to say), I don't think there is any plumbing that's useful for a git beginner.

Regards,
  Stephan

Footnote:
 1. A further comment about the intuitionality or "remembering":
    git-apply is plumbing and has an intuitional name (hence easy to
    remember), git-am is porcelain and does not have one.

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