Re: obnoxious CLI complaints

From: John Tapsell <johnflux@gmail.com>
Date: Sep 11, 2009, 00:18 UTC
Message-ID: <43d8ce650909101718j2f1f77cbgc347ee755145353f@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7v4ora76vr.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

2009/9/11 Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>:

Show 26 quoted lines

> John Tapsell <johnflux@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> 2009/9/10 Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com>:
>>> Dnia czwartek 10. września 2009 21:46, John Tapsell napisał:
>>>> 2009/9/10 Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com>:
>>>
>>>> > First, it would be consistent with how ordinary archivers such as tar
>>>> > or zip are used, where you have to specify list of files to archive
>>>> > (in our case this list is HEAD).  Second, I'd rather not accidentally
>>>> > dump binary to terminal: "git archive [HEAD]" dumps archive to standard
>>>> > output.
>>>>
>>>> That could be fixed by outputting to a file.  git format-patch outputs
>>>> to a file, so why wouldn't git achieve?
>>>
>>> "git format-patch" outputs to files because it generates _multiple_
>>> files; generating single patch is special case.  Also git-format-patch
>>> can generate file names from patch (commit) subject; it is not the case
>>> for "git archive" (what name should it use?).
>>
>> What if it used the current (or topleve) directory name?  Wouldn't
>> that work in most cases?
>
> Following along the same line of reasoning, it would work in most cases if
> the output is literally named "archive.tar".  If it is not the name the
> user wants, the user can "mv" afterwards, or give an explicit filename.

That would also work.  Like how gcc uses "a.out" as the default filename

> What it does _not_ allow is to send the output to a downstream command for
> postprocessing without introducing some magic token to say "standard
> output" (e.g. "git archive -f - | (cd ../foo && tar xf -)").

Right, so what's wrong with the magic token?  There's plenty of precedence.

> If the default is to write to the standard output, we won't have all of
> these issues.

These are issues?

>  People who want a file can name the file by
>
>        git archive >my.file.tar

I thought you didn't like this because then you dump binary to the console by default ?

> and people who want to pipe (which is 99% of the use pattern for me) can
> say
>
>        git archive | down stream commands.

Why would it be so bad to do:

git archive -f - | down stream commands

This is the most logical way forward. It keeps the command simple for simple use cases (make an archive - "git archive") but easily scalable for more complex use cases (add a "-f -" if you want to do magical things)

John