Re: [PATCH] pack-objects: Print a message describing the number of threads for packing

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Feb 26, 2008, 21:21 UTC
Message-ID: <20080226212118.GA32530@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <47C435DC.2070508@nrlssc.navy.mil>

On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 09:53:00AM -0600, Brandon Casey wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> 	git config pack.thread 4
> 	git repack
> 
> The user would immediately know something was wrong when they saw the
> message "Using 1 pack threads" instead of the "4" they thought they

There are hundreds of ways the user can fail to configure git correctly; I don't think it's worth printing output so verbose that the user can manually check that every config option was respected.

At any rate, I think your reasoning is not a good guideline for user output. You are making output to notice a mistake that happens one time (the time of config), but you are showing the output to the reader many times (every time they repack from here to eternity). But there are also mistakes that could be made in the "many times" case, and you are taking their attention away from that.

In the case of repack, it is probably not a big deal. But in the case of 'push', for example, I think we want as little output as possible taking attention away from the useful information: which refs were pushed, which were rejected, and so forth. That's why Nicolas made the pack-objects output considerably more terse last November.

> configured. Also, since it's only printed in the THREADED_DELTA_SEARCH
> case, it's also a confirmation that this option was indeed used for a
> particular build of git.

Same reasoning as above. You configure THREADED_DELTA_SEARCH once; you don't need to check that it was enabled every time you repack.

> I'd also say that if the message is too noisy in the "user explicitly
> assigned number of threads" case, then it's just as noisy in the "auto assign"
> case, so just remove the message completely.

I am not opposed to that; the "auto assign" case is nice to see the first time you repack ("did it find all of my CPUs?"), but yes, it probably will be the same every time after.

-Peff