Hi,

On Wed, 16 Jul 2008, Junio C Hamano wrote:

quoted text
> Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:
> 
> > On Wed, 16 Jul 2008, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> >
> >> Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:
> >> 
> >> > Am I the only one who deems teaching plumbing to users ("I like it 
> >> > raw!  So I teach it the same way!") harmful?
> >> 
> >> I think that justification is harmful.
> >> 
> >> More productive way to think about it is to identify cases where we 
> >> _need_ to go down to combination of the plumbing commands in our 
> >> daily workflow, with today's command set.  That would give us a good 
> >> indication that some Porcelain may need to be enhanced.
> >> 
> >> An example. I find myself running "git read-tree -m -u $another_state" 
> >> while redoing a series inside a "rebase -i" session to move commit 
> >> boundaries.  There may need an insn that says "use that tree" instead of 
> >> "edit" and running "read-tree -m -u" by hand.  This does not bother me 
> >> too much, but there probably are other examples.
> >> 
> >> Another example.  I often run "git ls-files -u" while looking at which 
> >> paths are conflicting.  ls-files is classified as plumbing, but it does 
> >> not bother me as much as having to see the staged long object names in 
> >> this output.  Other people, however, might find it yucky, and we might 
> >> want "git merge --unmerged" or something that lists the paths (and only 
> >> paths, no stage information) that still have conflicts.
> >
> > I agree that if you know Git internals -- and you and me do -- it comes in 
> > _right_ handy to know the 100+ commands with many options by heart.
> >
> > However, my point was about telling users, especially new ones.
> 
> Perhaps you did not read my first paragraph?

Well, I did.

But as was visible from the thread including this message:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/59935/focus=62021

I take it that we do not really have to go down to the plumbing that 
often.

Sure, advanced usage is nice, and often involves plumbing, especially for 
scripting.  And there is a time to explain plumbing.  But I think that the 
first lesson is not it.  Not even the second or the third.

And as I said in my first mail, I consider it harmful to _start out_ with 
plumbing.

And other answers in this thread (the ones that do not try to highjack the 
thread to talk about a crappy but popular SCM) make me even more certain 
of that.

Ciao,
Dscho

P.S.: Of course, there may be users who like to spend a lot of time 
grasping the internals of Git first, before issuing their first Git 
command.  Just like there are people who like electrodes on their thighs.
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