From: Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek <zbyszek@in.waw.pl>
Date: Mon, 27 Feb 2012 06:42:32 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH] fsck: do not print dangling objects by default
Message-ID: <4F4B25D8.8040803@in.waw.pl>
In-Reply-To: <7vhayddxgp.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On 02/26/2012 11:46 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Junio C Hamano<gitster@pobox.com>  writes:
>
>> I think that both the ultimate goal explained above, and the direction in
>> which the documentation updates tries to move us, are good.  I only gave a
>> cursory look at the code changes, but what they implement seems to match
>> the intention.
>>
>> Of course I may be missing something, so objections from others to argue
>> why we shouldn't do this is very much welcomed to stop me and Clemens ;-).
>
> Let's start with the obvious.
>
> It is much easier for a user to use a new option on the command line when
> he wants to use an improved behaviour when he runs the command manually.
> Having to update scripts that run the command to act on its output, on the
> other hand, is much more painful to the users.
>
> And the intended audience for this change clearly is interactive users
> that follow the user-manual to try things out.
>
> Given that, isn't it not just sufficient but actually better to instead
> add a new --no-dangling option and keep the default unchanged?

I understood the goal of this change as "modify fsck output to not show 
confusing 'dangling' messages by default. Not when running the tutorial 
and having the output explained in parallel, but when someone runs 
git-fsck to clean up the repository. In that situation, if somebody 
knows enough to run --no-dangling, than they know enough to ignore the 
'dangling' messages in the output.

For the knowledgeable user, --no-dangling could be useful to avoid 
uninteresting messages which usually dwarf the rest of output, but this 
would be less important.

Zbyszek