Re: [PATCH] grep: provide a noop --recursive option

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason  <avarab@gmail.com> writes:

> This --recursive (-r) option does nothing, and is purely here to
> appease people who have "grep -r ..." burned into their muscle memory.
>
> Requested-by: Christoph Berg <myon@debian.org>
> Signed-off-by: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
> ---

I personally am not all that sympathetic to the "'git grep' and
'grep' sound similar, so even though it won't do anything useful
just add a synonym to noop" line of reasoning.  That will lead to
sloppy noop, and will invite unbound amount of busywork to deal with
future complaints like "oh, but 'grep GNU COPYING' does not give
useless filename in front like the same command line with 'git'
prefixed; please fix 'git grep'" (which we'd have to say "no",
wasting our time).

I however do not mind if we added "--recursive" with matching
"--no-recursive", and

 - made "--recursive" the default (obviously)

 - made "--no-recursive" a synonym to setting the recursion limit
   to "never recurse"

 - and made "--recursive" a synonym to setting the recursion limit
   to "infinity".

That would be more work than this patch.  But if I see "--recursive"
advertised as a feature, and the command by default goes recursive,
I do expect to be able to tell it not to recurse.

I also expect folks who are used to "git grep --re<TAB>" to summon
the only option of the command that begins with that prefix to start
complaining that they now have to type "--recurs<TAB>" instead.  I
am not solving that with the above suggestion to improve the
suggested "noop".