Re: [PATCH] Add contrib/stg-gitk: helper script to run gitk

From: Yann Dirson <ydirson@altern.org>
Date: Jan 12, 2007, 22:47 UTC
Message-ID: <20070112224733.GA9761@nan92-1-81-57-214-146.fbx.proxad.net>
In-Reply-To: <b0943d9e0701101547v5e18bdf8xcc34cf78ea5f1f9f@mail.gmail.com>

On Wed, Jan 10, 2007 at 11:47:33PM +0000, Catalin Marinas wrote:

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> On 09/01/07, Yann Dirson <ydirson@altern.org> wrote:
> >On Tue, Jan 09, 2007 at 10:02:06AM +0000, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> >> There is 'stg series --graphical' that invokes gitk.
> >
> >For some reason I did not look for this functionality in that place :)
> >
> >But it is a bit different, in that unapplied patches appear detached
> >from the whole history.  Possibly out of personal taste, I do not find
> >this very useful, and prefer to see them as "gitk --all" shows them.
> 
> I've never tried 'gitk --all' but I'm OK with changing the way
> --graphical option displays the patches.

Indeed "stg series -g" may differ too much from "stg-gitk" to plug the functionnality at this place: "stg series" is a command acting on one stack, whereas stg-gitk is a repository-wide command, allowing to draw several stacks, and also includes anything below stack base, which looks also out of the scope of "stg series -g". Maybe a new command is called for - possibly as something like "stg repo graph [<branch>...]" ?

Show 16 quoted lines

> >That makes me think that such command names like "show" are a bit too
> >general: stgit uses "show" for patches, but nothing says it is for a
> >patch and not a series.
> 
> This was initially a re-implementation of 'git show' that was able to
> understand patch names (you can also give any commit id as argument).
> I later extended it to accept patch ranges.
> 
> >Also, when presenting GIT/StGIT to co-workers, I found them to be
> >confused by eg. "stg push" and "stg commit" having different semantics
> >than "git push" and "git commit".
> 
> As I said in a different e-mail, push/pop were the command names used
> by quilt. I agree that they are confusing. Maybe we could change
> commit/uncommit to store/unstore or something else (but I would like
> to keep push/pop).

OK, the command names were borrowed from tools which provide a fraction of the functionnality stgit (not exactly so in the case of GIT, OK ;). That makes it easy for people used to those commands that served as inspiration to the stgit ones, I know that (I used quilt before stgit). But I do feel that having a more consistent command set would help - remember quilt has no idea of branches, multiple repositories and history, stgit is in many ways a very different beast :)

> You can use the bash aliases if you want (i.e.  'alias
> stg-ppush="stg push"').

The argument is not about *me*, I can happily use "stg push". It is about smoothing the learning curve by providing a command set that would be easier to dive in. One where, for example, the user wanting to do some action on a patch, but not remembering the exact command, could confidently use bash completion with "stg patch <TAB>" and get the list of patch commands. That would be easier than having to "stg --help" and find the command in the full list.

And then, legacy commands like "stg push" would be better implemented as stgit aliases, since an "stg-push" shell alias as replacement would break scripts.

> I don't like the idea of command aliases that much, it looks like
> unneeded complexity.

There are already aliases in GIT itself, they are quite simple to understand, and would probably require very little code in python. I'll have a look at that, unless you would veto integration of such a patch.

Best regards,

-- 
Yann.