Re: [PATCHv5 1/3] wt-status.*: better advices for git status added

[Phil Hord <phil.hord@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Jun 1, 2012 at 12:57 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> Phil Hord <phil.hord@gmail.com> writes:
>
>>   $ git status --sequencer
>>   You have unmerged paths.
>>   You are in an am session.
>>   You are in the middle of an interactive rebase.
>>
>>   $ git status --porcelain --sequencer
>>   airu
>>
>> The "--porcelain --sequencer" combination I am imagining here would
>> show the status as a script-parseable sequence of single-letter
>> indicators telling the status of these same various conditions:
>>   u - unmerged paths
>>   a - git-am session
>>   i - interactive rebase
>>   r - rebase
>>   c - cherry-pick
>>   m - merge
>> etc.
>
> Some people seem to think that machine-readable has to mean
> unreadable cryptic line noises.  It's a disease.
>
> If you have to write "etc.", you clearly do not know what the
> range of possible values of these things will eventually be.
>
> And I do not think it is your fault not to know what we would want
> to add in the future.  But it is your fault to choose unreadable
> cryptic line noises as an output format.
>
> Just spell them out, and do not mark them for translation.

I agree.  And I waffled a bit between single-letter indicators,
abbreviated token-words, and fully spelled out words as you suggested.
 But I do think about future spelling or wording corrections (see
--indexed and http-referer), and I opted for letters in this example.

Thanks for the suggestion.  If I push this along, I'll use words and
let the list sort out the spellings.

Phil