From: Vincent van Ravesteijn Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2012 07:47:46 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/2] Unification of user message strings Message-ID: <4F683622.6010409@lyx.org> In-Reply-To: <7vaa3c9ste.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org> > 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