From: Owen Taylor <otaylor@redhat.com>
To: Rob Barrett <barrettboy@gmail.com>
Cc: git@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Usability question
Date: Thu, 17 Sep 2009 07:20:20 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <1253186420.11581.380.camel@localhost.localdomain> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <513ca40e0909170301s2b09184akb27acde76975c09b@mail.gmail.com>
On Thu, 2009-09-17 at 20:01 +1000, Rob Barrett wrote:
> When starting with git people almost always ask some variant of "how
> do I know whether this option should be prefixed with dashes or not?"
> i.e. git reset --hard vs. git stash save --patch, which coupled with
> other path, sha and treeish args make things a bit more confusing.
>
> Not sure if this has been discussed before? If it has point me at the
> discussion and I'll go look at it -- no need to read further.
>
> And people stop asking the question after they get used to git - but
> that's not the same as being usable.
>
> Out of 60+ commands, most take the form
> git <subcommand> [--option]
> and a few take the form
> git <subcommand> subsubcommand [--option]
>
> (a quick scan gives: bisect,bundle,reflog,remote,stash)
>
> My questions:
> 1. What is the distinction that makes the 10% special enough to get
> non-prefixed options?
> 2. Is it worthwhile? Wouldn't it be better if to shoot for more
> consistency / less complexity?
I don't think anybody is going to say that it all makes perfect sense.
One pattern is:
git <verb>
vs.
git <subsystem> <verb> (gui, svn, ...)
git <noun> <verb> (bundle, remote, stash, submodule, ...)
Another pattern is that options don't change the verb, they just
modify it.
But it's easy to find exceptions:
git tag -l
git branch --contains <commit>
git am --abort
I personally think it would help consistency to use the subsubcommand
pattern more and treat 'git tag <tag>' as an shorthand. If you really
want to to create a tag called 'list', you'd need to use
'git tag tag list', or maybe 'git tag -- list'.
Even with compat support for options and a general agreement that I
doubt exists, that's at best a 95% compatible change, so it's unlikely
to happen soon.
- Owen
prev parent reply other threads:[~2009-09-17 11:20 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 8+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2009-09-17 10:01 Usability question Rob Barrett
2009-09-17 10:41 ` Matthieu Moy
2009-09-17 12:13 ` SZEDER Gábor
2009-09-17 13:09 ` Matthieu Moy
2009-09-17 13:25 ` Daniele Segato
2009-09-20 2:21 ` Rob Barrett
2009-09-20 18:54 ` Dmitry Potapov
2009-09-17 11:20 ` Owen Taylor [this message]
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