From: Denton Liu <liu.denton@gmail.com>
To: Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com>
Cc: "Git Mailing List" <git@vger.kernel.org>,
"Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason" <avarab@gmail.com>,
"Andreas Schwab" <schwab@linux-m68k.org>,
"Duy Nguyen" <pclouds@gmail.com>,
"Johannes Schindelin" <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>,
"Johannes Sixt" <j6t@kdbg.org>,
"Junio C Hamano" <gitster@pobox.com>,
"Philip Oakley" <philipoakley@iee.org>,
"Vincent Guittot" <vincent.guittot@linaro.org>,
"Viresh Kumar" <viresh.kumar@linaro.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] git-diff.txt: prefer not using <commit>..<commit>
Date: Wed, 20 Mar 2019 10:28:09 -0700 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20190320172809.GA17593@dev-l> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CABPp-BEy9nN=aV8Y+ueYqv299umHoF2E=8D7heJARM4Qa7P5JQ@mail.gmail.com>
Hi Elijah,
Sorry for the late reply, I've been mulling over it for the past couple
of days.
On Mon, Mar 18, 2019 at 10:59:56AM -0700, Elijah Newren wrote:
> Hi Denton,
>
> Thanks for working on this. Some thoughts...
>
> On Sun, Mar 17, 2019 at 4:09 AM Denton Liu <liu.denton@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > The documentation used to consider
> >
> > git diff <commit> <commit>
> >
> > and
> >
> > git diff <commit>..<commit>
> >
> > to be equal counterparts. However, rev-list-ish commands also use the
> > <commit>..<commit> notation, but in a logically conflicting manner which
> > was confusing for some users (including me!).
> >
> > Deprecating the notation entirely is not really an option because it
> > would be an arduous process without much end-value. In addition, there
> > are some valid use-cases that we don't want to break.
>
> Yes, there were multiple people who commented that they liked to
> copy-paste the "A..B" output from fetch/pull in combination with diff
> and log (even though one suggested that this gave the wrong output and
> what they really wanted was "diff A...B").
>
> However, "removal of functionality" isn't the only form of
> deprecation/warning. Updating the manpage is another one which you
> implemented, but I'd like to suggest yet another: Prefix the diff with
> a warning message, e.g.
>
> "WARNING: You ran 'git diff A..B' (which means the same thing as 'git
> diff A B'). Many users confuse 'git diff A..B' and 'git diff A...B'.
> Please see 'git diff --help' for more details."
>
> Having extra text (e.g. commit message or warning) at the beginning of
> the diff does not prevent tools like patch(1) or git-apply(1) from
> successfully applying it, it still makes sense to humans (and who as
> an added bonus happen to be really good at filtering out common
> messages if they do encounter them more than a few times), and gives
> us a chance in the future to figure out how to potentially extend the
> message to make it a deprecation warning and/or provide details about
> how to change the behavior of '..' to either be an error or behave
> like triple dots or just not warn.
>
>
> Elijah
I was originally planning on doing something like this (by warning to
stderr, but your idea actually gets to the user ;) ). The only thing I'm
worried about for a change like this is that it'll be very controversial
since, as we could see anecdotally, a lot of people have trained
themselves to use the .. form.
In terms of backwards compatibility, I think that there's the
possibility of breaking some scripts by doing this change but we could
mitigate this by detecting if we're outputting to a terminal and only
print the message in that case.
Thanks for the suggestion!
Denton
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2019-03-20 17:28 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 16+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2019-03-17 11:09 [PATCH] git-diff.txt: prefer not using <commit>..<commit> Denton Liu
2019-03-17 13:24 ` Duy Nguyen
2019-03-18 6:45 ` Junio C Hamano
2019-03-19 1:12 ` Denton Liu
2019-03-21 14:12 ` Johannes Schindelin
2019-03-17 13:40 ` Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
2019-03-17 14:01 ` Duy Nguyen
2019-03-17 14:12 ` Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
2019-03-18 6:47 ` Junio C Hamano
2019-03-18 17:46 ` Elijah Newren
2019-03-18 19:07 ` Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
2019-03-19 0:56 ` Junio C Hamano
2019-03-20 14:21 ` Elijah Newren
2019-03-18 17:59 ` Elijah Newren
2019-03-20 17:28 ` Denton Liu [this message]
2019-03-21 13:58 ` Elijah Newren
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