From: Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2009 05:50:10 GMT Subject: Re: what are plumbing and porcelain Message-ID: <200901202350.15011.bss@iguanasuicide.net> In-Reply-To: <20090121052741.GC6970@b2j> On Tuesday 20 January 2009, bill lam wrote about 'what are plumbing and porcelain': >Sorry for this idiot question, but I really don't know what they are >and why it is necessary to distinguish between them. "plumbing" are the commands that do low-level operations. Generally, end-users won't have to use them much, if at all, but they are "fundamental" operations, upon which git is built. It's a term also used in other project some, with a similar meaning. "porcelain" is a cute name for the end-user operations. They "cover" the plumbing to make it look and act "pretty". While some may be less useful to some users, they all are high-level operations that depend on the plumbing. It's important to distinguish between them because we don't want the plumbing to get needlessly complex. They should be single-purpose commands and their options should be utilitarian in nature. Also, porcelain is meant to be used interactively, not in scripts, so the output or behavior might change a bit--but that is still kept to a minimum. -- Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. ,= ,-_-. =. bss@iguanasuicide.net ((_/)o o(\_)) ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy `-'(. .)`-' http://iguanasuicide.net/ \_/