Re: [PATCH 2/4] add -u: get rid of "treewideupdate" configuration

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Apr 8, 2011, 22:32 UTC
Message-ID: <20110408223206.GA7343@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <7vmxk01izn.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Fri, Apr 08, 2011 at 03:22:20PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

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> So let's step back a bit.
> 
> How about we'd just add ':/' to make it equally easy to switch between
> "local only" vs "tree-wide" in 1.7.6 release, and be done with it.  We
> don't change the default for any of the commands at all.

Yeah, I am beginning to think that is a sensible route. And it commits us to nothing, so if we decide much later that a change of default is sensible, that is still open to us.

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> Since more than a year ago, I've been saying that the ideal is to make the
> default not matter:
> 
>   http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/133570/focus=133683
> 
> If the default does not matter, why change it?  It just causes us more
> headaches for dubious gain, no?

I'm not sure how much you can achieve the "make it not matter". The shorthands go a long way, but I still want git to read my mind about which I wanted to use (and the closest approximation of that, from my experience, would be a per-repo variable). However, having the shorthands mean that we can try them out in the real world and revisit the topic in a year if people still care.

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> IIRC, I think the two reasons why we started discussing of "add -u" and
> friends were that (1) some commands default to whole-tree while others
> limit to $cwd --- inconsistency is bad; and (2) when the user wants to do
> a full tree "add -u", there is no way other than counting the current
> depth and typing "../" that many times.
> 
> But when we looked at the current set of commands that limit them to the $cwd,
> we found that "add -u" was the only one that may make sense to switch the
> default, meaning that the "consistency" was not something we would even
> want to shoot for.  For example, we want our "git grep -e pattern" to
> mimic "grep -r -e pattern .".

I am not sure of that. I thought there was interest in full-tree grep (OK, _I_ had some interst in it). But the same transition pain arguments apply there, and we should be able to do "git grep pattern :/" soon, right?

-Peff