Re: Considering teaching plumbing to users harmful

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

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.