[alinajaf]

I'm going to put my grumpy old man hat on for a second and say that if you don't understand how git works, then you shouldn't be using it. Go use svn or hg or something that has a simpler internal model, and good luck to you.

For me, gits internal model is simply not that hard, and I'm a run of the mill twenty-something year old developer who feels vaguely guilty about not knowing how fundamental data structures and algorithms work. It's a directed acyclic graph that points to items in a content addressable database. Between the progit book and the man pages, I had a pretty good conceptual model of it in an afternoon. I encourage anyone who actually wants to learn it to spend a little time with TFM and get it out of the way.

Otherwise, seriously, quit your whining. The CLI makes intuitive sense to me and I can manipulate the DAG without much mental effort. The worst case scenario is that you rebase public history, and `git help rebase` will tell you how to get yourself out of that mess.

[rcthompson]

I can appreciate the sentiment that Git's internal model is straightforward enough that the UI is justified in exposing it. However, you also have to consider the perspective of someone who sees a cool project, decides to contribute code, sees that that the project code is in a git repo, and says, "Ok, I'll learn the basics of git so I can contribute to this cool project." It's not fair to expect such a person to learn the whole data model of git and how all the commands map to it just so they can contribute a 5-line patch in the project's native VCS. So I think there's definitely a strong argument in favor of providing a porcelain for Git that is independent of its plumbing, even if that porcelain is only capable of some basic operations.

[alinajaf]

In that particular case, I'd be inclined to send over the patch as a diff file, though I can see the point your making.

[rcthompson]

Even if you just want to send a patch, in order to get the patch you need to run diff on the original file and the changed one. If you've already edited your copy, then in order to get a copy of the original you're back to either figuring out basic git usage or hoping that the source repo provides a web interface from which you can download it. Either way, without knowing how to use git the prospective contributor could easily get discouraged and give up.

[e_proxus]

But I'm not using git so I have to understand how a RCS works, I'm using git so I can keep track of my files!

Similarly, you don't program C just so you have to learn assembler and how a CPU works. Yes, if you do you can do awesome things, but that's not the point, that's a bonus.