From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2011 16:05:55 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH 8/8] trace: give repo_setup trace its own key
Message-ID: <20110224160555.GB30275@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <4D668076.7020000@op5.se>

On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 04:59:50PM +0100, Andreas Ericsson wrote:

> On 02/24/2011 03:30 PM, Jeff King wrote:
> > You no longer get this output with GIT_TRACE=1; instead, you
> > can do GIT_TRACE_SETUP=1.
> > 
> 
> It would be beneficial if GIT_TRACE still turned on tracing globally
> so one doesn't have to know all flags to start tracing for errors.
> 
> I also imagine running GIT_TRACE=1 <command> as the first step would
> be quite useful for when one's not entirely certain where the problem
> lies and then use the specific tracing flag when trying to fix it.

Yeah, I considered that GIT_TRACE should become "trace everything" and
the existing traces split up into specific keys. I had a few concerns:

  - Having this splitting mechanism gives us room to add debugging code
    that is probably not interesting, but may be if you are working on a
    specific problem, without having to worry about spamming people.
    Which means GIT_TRACE may eventually become unreadably verbose.

    Maybe GIT_TRACE should include some traces, but not others (like
    packet debugging, or giant diff state dumps).

  - I didn't want to change the meaning of GIT_TRACE too much, because
    it is advice that everybody knows (in docs, mailing list archives,
    etc).

But those are not strong objections. Just giving the rationale I used
while writing the patches. I'd be curious what others think.

-Peff