git porcelain v s plumbing

[jack]

It's not that I don't understand the etymology of --porcelain options. Lots of commands are "plumbing", ie. intended to produce output which is consumed by other commands rather than by the user, because git is like that.

So "porcelain" is coined to mean the opposite of that: output which is intended to by read by a person, and include lots of useless twiddles like human-readable column formatting, units, column headers, messages saying "there was nothing found" instead of returning "" etc.

And some commands are often used as user-facing commands, but can also be used by scripts and other commands intended to produce more user-friendly output, and so have a command line option "--porcelain" to mean "produce output which can be parsed by another command".

It's not that I don't know that.

It's that I think it's unnecessarily confusing that:

1. "Porcelain" means not "smooth, unencumbered" but the opposite
2. "--porcelain" means "make the output not porcelain".

Comments

[zub]

I can’t help but wonder what sort of porcelain this might be. Is it a deliberate implication that Git is akin to some particular piece of bathroom apparatus? :-)

[fluffymormegil]

Hey, Linus said he called it 'git' because he likes to name his projects after himself, so... :)

[zub]

Yeah, it seems quite plausible. If this is deliberate, I wonder whether it’s intended to say more about Git itself or about the material Git handles.

I imagine the first two Git repositories (besides test repos) were Git and Linux, so maybe Linus views most of his job as shovelling the stuff? :-)