Re: [PATCHv3 3/7] show: honor --textconv for blobs

> On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 10:01:38PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> 
>> Michael J Gruber <git@drmicha.warpmail.net> writes:
>>
>>> Adding to that:
>>>
>>> Somehow I still feel I should introduce a new attribute "show" (or a
>>> better name) similar to "diff" so that you can specifiy a diff driver to
>>> use for showing a blob (or grepping it), which may or may not be the
>>> same you use for "diff". This would be a much more fine-grained and
>>> systematic way of setting a default for "--textconv" for blobs.
>>>
>>> Of course, some driver attributes would just not matter for coverting
>>> blobs, but that doesn't hurt.
>>>
>>> I'm just wondering whether it's worth the effort and whether I should
>>> distinguish between "show" and grep".
>>
>> Haven't thought things through, but my gut feeling is that it is on
>> the other side of the line. We could of course add more features and
>> over-engineered mechanisms, and the implementation may end up to be
>> even modular and clean, but I cannot answer "Yes" with a confidence
>> to the question "Does such a fine grained control help the users?"
>> and cannot answer "If so in what way?" myself.
> 
> Yeah, I think the _most_ flexible thing is going to look something like:
> 
>   $ cat .gitattributes
>   *.pdf diff=pdf show=pdf
> 
>   $ cat ~/.gitconfig
>   [diff "pdf"]
>           textconv = ...
>   [show "pdf"]
>           textconv = ...
> 
> But that obviously sucks, because in the common case that you want to
> use the same command, you are repeating yourself in the config. You
> could assume that the "show" attribute points us at a "diff" block. And
> that makes sense for textconv, but what does it mean if you have
> "show=foo" and "diff.foo.command" set?

> If the _only_ thing you would want to do with such a "show" mechanism is
> to display converted contents on show/grep, then we could lose the
> flexibility and say that "show" is a single-bit: do we respect diff
> textconv for show/grep in this case, or not? And that leaves only the
> question of where to put it: is it a gitattribute, or does it go in the
> config?
> 
> I don't think that it is a property of the file itself. That is, you do
> not say "foo files are inherently uninteresting to git-show, and
> therefore we always convert them, whereas bar files do not have that
> property'. You say "in my workflows, I expect to see converted results
> from grep/show". And the latter points to using config, like either
> "diff.*.showConverted" (to allow per-type setting), or even
> "grep.useTextconv" and "show.textConv" (to allow setting it per-user for
> all types).