From: Olliver Schinagl <oliver@schinagl.nl>
Date: Fri, 22 Mar 2024 21:57:36 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/2] Support diff.wordDiff config
Message-ID: <3925ac99-bc05-4f8e-9a52-c22c13f6a4b5@schinagl.nl>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqedcszhty.fsf@gitster.g>

Hey list,

On 02-03-2024 18:03, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Karthik Nayak <karthik.188@gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> This patch series adds the diff.wordDiff config option. This mimics the
>> '--word-diff' option of `git-diff(1)`.
> 
> Is it even be sensible to introduce this configuration variable in
> the first place?

Of course it is :p as a human, I crave it :p

On a slightly more serious note though, I always have to use an alias, 
or the command line option I cannot use `git diff` with this as default. 
 From a human UX point of view, this is odd, and we have tons of 
configuration options to do exactly what is desired, without aliases.

I suppose the deeper discussion would be, do we distinct between user 
(human) facing options and arguments, and machine facing options and 
argument (in theory, yes we do; in practice things get abused).

Git is often blamed due to its horrible UX. I think the problem comes 
from the deeper issue mentioned above. Because things get abused, they 
can no longer be touched, not even to improve UX for the human.

> What would this do to users who set this variable
> and use third-party or their own scripts that run "git diff" under
> the hood?
> 
> The usual answer is "these tools should be using the low-level
> plumbing commands like diff-files, diff-index, and diff-tree", so I
> am not worried about it too much myself, and the above is purely the
> devil's advocate comment.
> 
> Having said that, running
> 
> 	$ git grep -e 'git diff '
> 
> in the collection of scripts I use [*] to work on this project, I am
> reminded that I may have to be a bit more conservative than I
> currently am about the risk of breaking scripts with the changes
> like the one being proposed.
> 
> The proposed feature also may break those who use the git-prompt and
> diff-highlight available in conrib/, even though I am not sure how
> badly they would break, because I only looked at the lines given by
> this command:
> 
> 	$ git grep -e 'git diff ' -- \*.sh ':!t/'
> 
> and didn't check how the output from 'git diff' is used.
> 
> 
> [Footnote]
> 
>   * They can be seen in the 'todo' branch, if anybody is interested.