Re: [PATCH] doc: explain default option for rev-parse --short

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: May 18, 2017, 15:59 UTC
Message-ID: <20170518155956.ecti4audvrqlj3pt@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <CAP96LmMtfO5DC6hGeqJdZvcqj+29H_7=8S+uua8YC7YwFRC9Nw@mail.gmail.com>

On Thu, May 18, 2017 at 11:03:00AM -0300, André Werlang wrote:

> Git 2.11 introduced a computation to guess the default length
> for commit short hashes. The documentation isn't updated.

Thanks for the patch. I think this is going in the right direction, but I have a few minor comments.

Show 7 quoted lines

> From 2b1c229153a89c7608e64b87d2f933704c18b7ae Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
> From: =?UTF-8?q?Andr=C3=A9=20Werlang?= <beppe85@gmail.com>
> Date: Thu, 18 May 2017 10:50:11 -0300
> Subject: [PATCH] doc: explain default option for rev-parse --short
> MIME-Version: 1.0
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

These headers are redundant with what's in your email headers and can be dropped.

Show 14 quoted lines

> diff --git a/Documentation/git-rev-parse.txt b/Documentation/git-rev-parse.txt
> index 7241e96..b49f053 100644
> --- a/Documentation/git-rev-parse.txt
> +++ b/Documentation/git-rev-parse.txt
> @@ -139,8 +139,10 @@ can be used.
>  --short::
>  --short=number::
>   Instead of outputting the full SHA-1 values of object names try to
> - abbreviate them to a shorter unique name. When no length is specified
> - 7 is used. The minimum length is 4.
> + abbreviate them to a shorter unique name. When no length is specified,
> + it is guessed from the number of objects in the repository. In any case,
> + the actual length will be enough to identify the object unambiguously
> + in the current state of the repository. The minimum length is 4.

This is definitely an improvement, though I wonder if we should mention that we default to core.abbrev (which in turn defaults to the "auto" behavior).

It looks like there are a few other mentions of "7" with respect to "--abbrev": git-branch.txt, git-describe.txt, git-blame.txt. Those should probably get the same treatment.

There are a few other "--abbrev" options (e.g., ls-files and ls-tree) that don't mention "7". But while we're fixing the others, it may be worth giving them all consistent text.

-Peff