On Wed, Dec 9, 2020 at 5:02 PM Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > A lot of external guides and people's mental models of /usr/bin/git as a > scriptable client reference the concept of plumbing & porcelain. Just > one such example [1] prompted me to write this E-Mail. > > I've wondered if we shouldn't be updating this concept to reflect the > reality on the ground in the git command ecosystem. > > I.e. if you look at "git help git"'s list of plumbing v.s. porcelain it > makes no mention or distinction between those commands & functionalities > that are truly transitory "porcelain". E.g. the specific error message a > command might return, and those that are effectively plumbing. E.g. some > "git config" functionality, "git init", the pretty formats in "git log" > etc. > > I'm not quite sure what I'm proposing if anything, just putting out > feelers to see if others think this documentary status quo has drifted > from reality. One option would be to split git into two binaries: "git" and "git-tool". Obviously the latter would be plumbing. We could slowly move the documentation to git-tool and by doing so we could see that if a porcelain man page has too many links to git-tool documentation, that's some area of opportunity. Every time you access a git-tool command inside git, it still would work, but you will get a warning: "you are using a plumbing command, use git-tool instead". Scripts could enable GIT_TOOL_MODE=1 if they are going to access many of these commands and don't want to s/git/git-tool/. I would be a ton of work, but it's something I see value in doing. Cheers. -- Felipe Contreras
