Relying on porcelain commands' output is the official way of interacting with git, they famously always refused to break it into a library. Nobody is going to use the low level git commands because: 1. Their output isn't any more reliable than the porcelain, and 2. How the porcelain uses them is also subject to change, so your UI might end up doing something different from the git high level command which is undesirable.

At least they gave us the `--porcelain` flag, meant exactly for this use case, to make the output format of porcelain commands never change. Dumb flag name, though.