Re: [PATCH 2/2] format-patch: allow for independent diff & range-diff options

[Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com>]

On Thu, Nov 29, 2018 at 11:03 AM Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
<avarab@gmail.com> wrote:
> I mean not just nasty in terms of implementation, yeah we could do it,
> but also a nasty UX for things like --word-diff-regex. I.e. instead of:
>
>     --range-diff-word-diff-regex='[0-9"]'
>
> You need:
>
>     --range-diff-opts="--word-diff-regex='[0-9\"]'"
>
> Now admittedly that in itself isn't very painful *in this case*, but in
> terms of precedent I really dislike that option, i.e. git having some
> mode where I need to work to escape input to pass to another command.
>
> Not saying that this --range-diff-* thing is what we should go for, but
> surely we can find some way to do deal with this that doesn't involve
> the user needing to escape stuff like this.

I should mention that it was never the intention that
git-format-patch's --range-diff option would allow passing _all_
possible options to git-range-diff, but only those most likely to be
tweaked by the user (such as --creation-factor). It was understood
from the start (and stated by me either in the cover letter to that
series or in discussion) that the user always has the escape hatch of
running git-range-diff manually and copy/pasting its output into the
cover letter.

So, I'm not convinced that we need this sort of flexibility in
git-format-patch's --range-diff option, but we certainly can add
convenience options (such as I did with --creation-factor) as people
complain that their favorite option is missing. For a UI, I think we
already have sufficient precedent for
"--range-diff-opts=nopatch,creation-factor:60" as a possibility.