Re: [PATCH 3/3] git checkout --nodwim

[Avery Pennarun <apenwarr@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 4:12 PM, Johannes Schindelin
<Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:
> On Sat, 24 Oct 2009, David Roundy wrote:
>> Perhaps a universal --plumbing flag would be handy?
>
> No.  Older Git versions do not know about it, so you cannot Just Modify
> Your Scripts.  So the benefit of --plumbing is dubitable.
>
> FWIW the same goes for --no-porcelain.

I suppose that, three years down the road, the existence of such an
option would be useful.  Until then, any change at all to any
command's interface seems to have the same problem as you describe.

That said, as a person who maintains a bunch of git-wrapping scripts
at work, it seems more straightforward to me to continue the
separation between plumbing vs. porcelain commands, rather than giving
each command two subtly incompatible modes.  It's much easier for me
to remember "don't use git checkout" than to remember "when you call
git checkout, make sure to use --plumbing, even though *today* it
works just fine without it."

I don't think there's actually a plumbing alternative to git-checkout,
however.  My git-subtree script (and another script at work) have
already had some bugs because of this (specifically, the differing
behaviour of git-checkout with and without a path specified).  Is
there something else I should be using in my scripts to be maximally
safe?

Have fun,

Avery