Josh Knowles recently suggested that maybe I could merge grb’s functionality to the github gem.

Both gems being command-line tools that help you use Git in a friendlier manner, the question makes a lot of sense. It makes so much sense in fact, that I decided to blog about it. A post about it will scale much better to answer other users who may potentially ask the same question.

So here’s a slightly edited excerpt from the answer I gave him. And yes, I also ramble in email.

I’ve seen what Scott added to the github gem. Pretty cool stuff indeed. I think the idea of merging with the github gem has merit. I definitely can see a future where we start having too many distinct command-line tools that help deal with Git’s sometimes obscure or numerous commands.

However I’m not sure I’d like to merge grb into the gh gem, despite the additional awareness it would get. Here’s why.

In my mind, the github gem should be mostly features about GitHub itself, like managing pull requests (the way GitHub does them). It’s starting to accumulate features that probably aren’t GitHub-specific, which I don’t mind, of course. But grb’s features really are GitHub-agnostic. I’ve started working on it before I even started using GitHub, in fact :-)

Reinforcing the previous point, I wouldn’t want someone who doesn’t use GitHub to not realize the features of grb are available to him because they’re included in a gem called ‘github’ ;-)

Also, one of the goals of git_remote_branch is to explicitly teach the underlying git commands. I do this by always spewing out the underlying commands in red, and by having the explain command. I’m pretty sure an unsuspecting user would wonder what hit him if a few of the github commands started spewing out red text in his console ;-) Having explain for a few commands (ported from grb) and not for the rest of the github gem’s commands would be weird, too.

There’s also a few other architectural decisions of grb that may not fit with github’s, like having aliases. Once again, grb being a teaching tool, I want to offer a bunch of aliases for forgetful people like me. So far I don’t see anything like aliases in github and I’m not sure how the authors of github-gem would react to a pull request polluting it with a bunch of aliases ;-)

Last but not least, the github gem already has a track command, which conflicts with grb’s. github’s is used to track a new remote repo in your local repo while grb’s is to track another branch from your current remote repo.