I've been using Git pretty much since it came out, and I just learned about "porcelain" this week. I have a project that involves parsing the output of `git sta

I've been using Git pretty much since it came out, and I just learned about "porcelain" this week. I have a project that involves parsing the output of `git status`, and adding the `--porcelain` flag is really helpful. It generates a more concise output that's easier to parse programmatically. I wondered how many commands have a more machine-readable output, and that led me to the git-scm page "Git Internals - Plumbing and Porcelain". In summary, Git was originally written as a toolkit for dealing with version control, rather than a polished version control system. Many of us who used Git from the early days learned to do VCS work with these lower-level commands, and we've passed those workflows on to many other people as well. This is the "plumbing" layer. Git later developed a more polished layer, referred to as the "porcelain". I'm not entirely clear yet on which commands are part of which layer, but this helped me make sense of the newer workflows I've seen recommended in recent years. It also gives me a better way of reasoning about possible changes to my own workflows. https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Internals-Plumbing-and-Porcelain https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Internals-Plumbing-and-Po...