Re: What is missing from Git v2.0

From: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 22, 2014, 05:10 UTC
Message-ID: <5355f9c16b665_15b012f3310d5@nysa.notmuch>
In-Reply-To: <20140422021256.GC86681@vauxhall.crustytoothpaste.net>

brian m. carlson wrote:

Show 14 quoted lines

> On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 09:24:33PM +0200, Sebastian Schuberth wrote:
> > BTW, in my experience people tend to stick to predefined aliases instead of
> > redefining them to something (completely) different. This means that having
> > default aliases will very likely enable one to use the same short commands
> > on one's colleague's PC (instead of you running into issues because the same
> > alias was defined to a different command).
> > 
> > If we don't standardize this now people will come up with their own
> > definitions [1] [2] (and many others if you just search GitHub) which are
> > again likely to differ (slightly), hindering interoperability.
> 
> Unfortunately, that's already happened.  Some people alias ci to commit,
> and some people alias it to commit -a.  There is literally no choice you
> can make there that will make everyone happy.

Of course we can: a) The people that have 'alias.co = git commit' will keep their alias b) The people that have 'alias.co = git commit -a' will keep their alias c) The people that haven't set alias.co, will get the default

> If you provide default aliases, people will expect them to work
> everywhere, and then be confused when they don't.

This argument was already brought up, and already proved to be false.

Mercurial allows not only to override the default alias, but to override the core commands, so you can alias 'hg push' to 'hg push --force'. According to your hypothesis people using Mercurial would get confused when basic commands work on certain machines and not others. This is not the case. I challenge you to find a single instance when people got confused because of the configured aliases.

> It's much better to let people alias what they want on their own.  I
> understand the frustration of having to work on others' machines when they
> don't have your aliases, because every time I type "git pff"[0] and it fails,
> it drives me crazy, but there's just no sane defaults.

Yes there are sane defaults.

  co = checkout
  ci = commit
  rb = rebase
  st = status
  br = branch
  dt = difftool
  mt = mergetool

-- 
Felipe Contreras