Re: [PATCH 3/3] mingw: document the experimental standard handle redirection

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:

>> > +Two special values are supported: `off` will simply close the
>> > +corresponding standard handle, and if `GIT_REDIRECT_STDERR` is
>> > +`2>&1`, standard error will be redirected to the same handle as
>> > +standard output.
>> 
>> Consistent with the Unixy special-case for '2>&1', I wonder if the
>> 'off' case would be more intuitively stated as '>/dev/null' or just
>> '/dev/null'...
>
> I feel this is the wrong way round. `>/dev/null` may sound very intuitive
> to you, but this feature is Windows only. Guess three times how intuitive
> it sounds to Windows developers to write `>/dev/null` if you want to
> suppress output...

It would be just as intuitive to write '2>&1' for dup-redirection,
so I tend to agree with both of you in that perhaps '2>&1' may have
to become less Unix-y (or more Windows-y) to make these special
cases more consistent.  Perhaps "dup-to-stdout" or even just "stdout".

	Side note: if we really wanted to go in the other direction
	Eric suggests, "off" probably should be spelled as ">&-" ;-)

By the way, the description talks about "special values", but it
leaves it completely unclear what their normal values mean.  Are
they filenames, or integers that denote file descriptors, or
something else?  To those who read, wrote, or reviewed the code in
these patches, the answer is obvious (and I do *not* want you to
give your answer to *me* in your response for that reason).  But
we'd want to give the answer to future readers by clarifying this
documentation.