The cathedral and the crypt

Everyone knows the cathedral's nave: commit, push, pull, merge — the bright upper floor where the daily processions pass. But old cathedrals have a lower floor. In the crypt lie the foundations and the bones: the commands that hold the whole building up, which almost nobody descends to see.

The division is not this collection's invention — it is Git's own. The documentation splits commands into porcelain, the presentation china made for people, and plumbing, the pipework made for scripts and for other commands. The Plumbing drawer keeps that second group in its pure state: cat-file, rev-parse, update-ref — the tools the porcelain is built with.

The five drawers

The rest of the holdings is porcelain that fell into oblivion, organized by the situation in which it saves the day: Rescue, for when work seems lost; Archaeology, for interrogating history; Workshop, for setting up the bench; and Surgery, for operating on history with a scalpel — and a warning sign.

Each bone points, on its label, to the official manpage it was checked against. The rarity — common, uncommon, forgotten — is the curators' opinion, and a fine bar argument.

Why lots of little pages

For the same reason as the herbarium and the reliquary: every bone, every drawer, every ordering and this very text are separate HTML files, linked together, written by a generator a few hundred lines long. State becomes an address; the browser handles the rest.