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0 pointsblakeyrat9y ago0 comments

A CLI is a user interface.

The problem with Git (well, one of many many problems with Git) is that it conflates its user interface with machine interfaces-- which means tools that have to work with Git (like those GUI clients) have to use the CLI to do so. They don't have a more powerful option, like an officially-supported API or a shared library they could call into. This is terrible software design.

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niftich9y ago

libgit2 [1]

In fact, there exist many alternative 'frontends' to Git. There are even protocol translators like Hg-Git [2], and many importers that typically use the fast-import format to ingest Git-impl primitives [3]

[1] https://libgit2.github.com/

[2] http://hg-git.github.io/

[3] https://github.com/frej/fast-export

blakeyratOP9y ago

libgit2 is not official, not in-sync with the main Git tool development, and doesn't support many of the features Git supports. So no, it isn't a solution to the problem.

Separating the UI and machine interface is something that should have been done from day one. In fact, I've been told Git's codebase actually already does that (it just doesn't expose the machine interface to the outside world.) Human beings are not machines. They have entirely different needs.

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