Re: Git User's Survey 2007 unfinished summary continued

From: Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com>
Date: Oct 20, 2007, 23:06 UTC
Message-ID: <8fe92b430710201606i47e85b24k17abd819bf0d353b@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <DE4FB702-24E8-421F-8447-04A5C7F7B5D2@zib.de>

On 10/20/07, Steffen Prohaska <prohaska@zib.de> wrote:

> Maybe we could group commands into more categories?
>
> plumbing: should be hidden from the 'normal' user. Porcelain
>    should be sufficient for every standard task.

The problem is division between what is porcelain and what is plumbing. Some commands are right on border (git-fsck, git-update-index, git-rev-parse comes to mind).

But it should be fairly easy to:
 1. put only porcelain in bash / zsh completion ('git <tab>' shows
only porcelain
 2. move plumbing out of PATH, but use exec-dir instead.

[...]

Show 5 quoted lines

> mail porcelain: the list will probably hate me for this, but
>    I think all commands needed to create and send patches per
>    mail are not essential. I suspect that I'll _never_ ask
>    my colleagues at work to send me a patch by mail. They'll
>    always push it to a shared repo.

Usually mail porcelain is in separate binary package, git-mail for RPMS packages for example. But iMVHO git-format-patch is as often used as other commands, and is certainly porcelain.

> import/export: Many commands are only used for importing
>    from or exporting to other version control systems. Examples
>    are git-cvs*, git-svn*. They are not needed once you switched
>    to git.

Those are also in separate packages.

> admin: Some commands are not used in a typical workflow. For
>    example git-filter-branch or git-fsck have a more admin
>    flavor.

These are a few commands only. I'm not sure about how to separate those from ordinary commands.

[...]

Show 8 quoted lines

> So here are a few questions:
>
> Could we find a small set of core porcelain commands that
> completely cover a typical workflow? The core section of the
> manual should only refer to those commands. Absolutely no
> plumbing should be needed to tweak things. In principle, a
> typical user should be able to work if _all other_ commands
> except for core porcelain are hidden from his PATH.

The problem here I suppose might lie with the same reason why (almost?) all Office Lite systems failed: because even if 80% of people use only 20% of functaionality, it is not the _same_ 20%.

-- 
Jakub Narebski