Re: Design of multiple hash support

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Nov 5, 2018, 22:00 UTC
Message-ID: <20181105220042.GA162375@google.com>
In-Reply-To: <CACsJy8B+WAyjrthKs9nr=kLpx7f8k_Dug4rRdYDoBR+mmLHCuQ@mail.gmail.com>

Hi,

Duy Nguyen wrote:

> On Mon, Nov 5, 2018 at 2:02 AM brian m. carlson
> <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net> wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

>> There are basically two approaches I can take.  The first is to provide
>> each command that needs to learn about this with its own --hash
>> argument.  So we'd have:
>>
>>   git init --hash=sha256
>>   git show-index --hash=sha256 <some-file
>>
>> The other alternative is that we provide a global option to git, which
>> is parsed by all programs, like so:
>>
>>   git --hash=sha256 init
>>   git --hash=sha256 show-index <some-file

[...]

> I'm leaning towards "git foo --hash=".

Can you say a little more about the semantics of the option? For commands like "git init", I tend to agree with Duy here, since it allows each command's manual to describe what the option means in the context of that command.

For "git show-index", ideally Git should use the object format named in the idx file.

>> There's also the question of what we want to call the option.  The
>> obvious name is --hash, which is intuitive and straightforward.
>> However, the transition plan names the config option
>> extensions.objectFormat,

[...]

> --object-format is less vague than --hash. The downside is it's longer
> (more to type) but I'm counting on git-completion.bash and the guess
> that people rarely need to use this option.

Agreed. --object-format makes more sense to me than --hash, since it's more precise about what the option affects.

Thanks for looking into this.

Sincerely, Jonathan