Re: [PATCH] git-am: Handle "git show" output correctly
- From
Andreas Ericsson <ae@op5.se>
- Date
- Sep 12, 2012, 22:41 UTC
- Message-ID
- <50510F7C.4080700@op5.se>
- In-Reply-To
- <7vhar2c29s.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
On 09/13/2012 12:19 AM, Junio C Hamano wrote:
Show 26 quoted lines
> Dan Johnson <computerdruid@gmail.com> writes: > >>> Not really. If we start encouraging people to use "git show" output >>> as a kosher input to "am", we would have to support such use >>> forever, and we end up painting ourselves in a corner we cannot get >>> out of easily. >> >> If git am emitted a warning when accepting "git show" output, it seems >> like it would support Peter's use-case without encouraging bad >> behavior? > > Are you seriously suggesting me to sell to our users a new feature > saying "this does not work reliably, we would not recommend using > it, no, really, don't trust it." from the day the feature is > introduced, especially when we know it will not be "the feature does > not work well yet, but it will, we promise" but is "and it may become > worse in the future"? > > I do not see much point in doing that. > > Besides, what bad behaviour do we avoid from encouraging with such > an approach? As Peter said, the problem is not on the part of the > user who ended up with an output from "git show", when he really > wants output from "git format-patch". Giving the warning to the > user of "git am" is too late. >
It might be enough to either enable format-patch output or print a warning to stderr when stdout is not a tty. I believe that would at least mitigate the problem, and it might educate the user as well. We already modify output format when stdout is not a tty (removing colors), so we're not giving guarantees about its format when it's piped somewhere. I believe that would provide almost every scenario with the expected outcome (including 'git show | grep'), but there will be a handful of very surprised people as well.
-- Andreas Ericsson andreas.ericsson@op5.se OP5 AB www.op5.se Tel: +46 8-230225 Fax: +46 8-230231 Considering the successes of the wars on alcohol, poverty, drugs and terror, I think we should give some serious thought to declaring war on peace.