Re: [PATCH v2 2/3] fast-export: rename --signed-tags='warn' to 'warn-verbatim'

[Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com>]

On Wed, Apr 21, 2021 at 8:34 PM Luke Shumaker <lukeshu@lukeshu.com> wrote:
> The --signed-tags= option takes one of five arguments specifying how to
> handle signed tags during export.  Among these arguments, 'strip' is to
> 'warn-strip' as 'verbatim' is to 'warn' (the unmentioned argument is
> 'abort', which stops the fast-export process entirely).  That is,
> signatures are either stripped or copied verbatim while exporting, with
> or without a warning.
>
> Match the pattern and rename 'warn' to 'warn-verbatim' to make it clear
> that it instructs fast-export to copy signatures verbatim.
>
> To maintain backwards compatibility, 'warn' is still recognized as
> an undocumented alias.

Maintaining backward compatibility is good; making it undocumented is
perhaps less than good. I understand the motivation for not wanting to
document it: if it's not documented, people won't discover it, thus
won't use it. However, we also should take into consideration that
there may be scripts and documentation in the wild which use `warn`.
If someone comes across one of those and wants to learn what it means,
they won't be able to if the documentation doesn't mention it at all;
they'll either have to consult the source code to find out its purpose
or post a question somewhere, hoping that someone knows the answer.

So, rather than removing it from the documentation altogether, it's
probably better to mention that it is a deprecated alias of
`warn-verbatim`. As precedent, for instance, see the `dimmed-zebra`
option in Documentation/diff-options.txt which still mentions its
`dimmed_zebra` synonym:

    dimmed-zebra::
        Similar to 'zebra', but additional dimming of uninteresting
        parts of moved code is performed. The bordering lines of two
        adjacent blocks are considered interesting, the rest is
        uninteresting. `dimmed_zebra` is a deprecated synonym.

> Signed-off-by: Luke Shumaker <lukeshu@datawire.io>
> ---
> diff --git a/Documentation/git-fast-export.txt b/Documentation/git-fast-export.txt
> @@ -27,7 +27,7 @@ OPTIONS
> ---signed-tags=(verbatim|warn|warn-strip|strip|abort)::
> +--signed-tags=(verbatim|warn-verbatim|warn-strip|strip|abort)::
> @@ -36,8 +36,8 @@ When asking to 'abort' (which is the default), this program will die
> -exported and with 'warn', they will be exported, but you will see a
> -warning.
> +exported and with 'warn-verbatim', they will be exported, but you will
> +see a warning.

So, perhaps this could end with:

    `warn` is a deprecated synonym of `warn-verbatim`.