Re: What's cooking in git.git (Jul 2019, #06; Thu, 25)

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Aug 10, 2019, 06:10 UTC
Message-ID: <20190810061006.GB25876@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <CABURp0pb4QY+Qbvn6YAtQ=bevSQW+vQXFMChyd_phtUK4P5M7w@mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, Aug 09, 2019 at 11:05:34AM -0700, Phil Hord wrote:

Show 18 quoted lines

> On Fri, Aug 9, 2019 at 10:48 AM Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> >
> > Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:
> >
> > > I don't know of any plans for checkout in particular, but I think the
> > > docs for restore/switch make it clear that it's way too early to start
> > > scripting around them:
> > >
> > >   $ git grep EXPERIMENTAL Documentation/
> > >   Documentation/git-restore.txt:THIS COMMAND IS EXPERIMENTAL. THE BEHAVIOR MAY CHANGE.
> > >   Documentation/git-switch.txt:THIS COMMAND IS EXPERIMENTAL. THE BEHAVIOR MAY CHANGE.
> >
> > Would it ever be OK to script around checkout, restore and/or switch
> > Porcelain commands?
> 
> Users who wish to get their job done will script around porcelain all
> the time.  I would be surprised if even 1% of build scripts use 'git
> checkout-index' instead of 'git checkout'.

It's even worse if you really want to switch branches, and not checkout files. You'd probably need to use symbolic-ref, read-tree, and checkout-index.

IMHO scripting around "action" commands like checkout is less bad than around "output" commands like log. The general action of "switch to this branch" is unlikely to be changed much over the years (or via config), but the output of log, etc, is.

There are no guarantees, of course, but I imagine that the tradeoff in simplicity of using git-switch versus manually reimplementing it is probably a good one for many scripts.

-Peff