Re: [PATCH v3 0/5] Add --no-ahead-behind to status

> On Fri, Jan 05, 2018 at 11:46:24AM -0500, Jeff Hostetler wrote:
> 
>>> I'm mildly negative on this "level 2" config. If influencing the
>>> porcelain via config creates compatibility headaches, then why would we
>>> allow it here? And if it doesn't, then why do we need to protect against
>>> it? This seems to exist in a funny middle ground that cannot decide
>>> whether it is bad or not.
>>>
>>> It's like we're inserting a foot-gun, but putting it just far enough out
>>> of reach that we can blame the user when they shoot themselves with it.
>>>
>>> Is there a compelling use case for this? From the previous discussion,
>>> this is the strawman I came up with:
>> [...]
>>
>> I kinda trying to serve 2 masters here.  As we discussed earlier, we
>> don't want config options to change porcelain formats, hence the
>> true/false thing only affecting non-porcelain formats.  On the other
>> hand, VS and git.exe are on different release schedules.  Normally,
>> I'd just have VS emit a "git status --no-ahead-behind --porcelain=v2"
>> and be done, but that requires that git.exe gets updated before VS.
>> We do control some of that, but if VS gets updated first, that causes
>> an error, whereas "git -c status.aheadbehind=<x> status --porcelain=v2"
>> does not.  It is respected if/when git is updated and ignored until
>> then.  Likewise, if they update git first, we can tell them to set a
>> config setting on the repo and inherit it for porcelain v2 output
>> without VS knowing about it.  Sorry, if that's too much detail.
> 
> OK, so my strawman was totally off-base. :)
> 
> That explanation is interesting. I do think you're facing a real problem
> with moving the versions in lockstep. But shoe-horning the feature into
> config like this seems like a pretty ugly solution:
> 
>    1. Then we're stuck with this weird foot-gun config option forever.
> 
>    2. It only solves the problem for this one option. Is there a more
>       general solution?
> 
> The more general solutions I can come up with are:
> 
>    1. Is there a way for a caller to query Git to say "do you understand
>       --no-ahead-behind?".
> 
>       You can ask "git version", but parsing version numbers is
>       problematic. We don't have any kind of "feature flags" output, and
>       I'm not sure we'd want to get down to the level of specific
>       command-line options there.
> 
>       One thing you can do is speculatively run "status --no-ahead-behind",
>       and if it returns 129, try again without as a fallback. That incurs
>       a failed invocation for the fallback case, but it's quick (we fail
>       before looking at any data) and you can cache it for the duration
>       of a VS session.
> 
>    2. There could be some way to tell the option parser that the next
>       flag is optional. E.g.:
> 
>         git status --optional=--no-ahead-behind
> 
>       That would be pretty easy to implement globally in parse-options.c.
>       It knows when an option is unrecognized, so it could just treat
>       that as a silent noop rather than barfing.
> 
>       Of course, that doesn't solve your problem today. It wouldn't be
>       safe to start using "--optional" until it had been in several
>       released versions.
> 
>       And I have a feeling it may not be sufficient without further
>       feedback to the caller. For this flag, the caller is happy to say
>       "do this if you know how, but otherwise I will cope". But there are
>       probably flag where it would need to know whether it had any effect
>       or not. So this whole direction is probably crazy.
> 
> Of the two, I think (1) is not so bad.
> 
>> It is OK with me if we omit the last commit in the patch series (that
>> does the experimental =2 extension) and I'll deal with this separately
>> (maybe differently) in the gvfs fork.
> 
> That would be my preference. Thanks.
> 
> -Peff
>