Re: [WARNING] Proposed future changes that are backward incompatible

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Feb 27, 2009, 19:59 UTC
Message-ID: <7v3adzk5wb.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20090227192708.6266.qmail@science.horizon.com>

"George Spelvin" <linux@horizon.com> writes:

Show 8 quoted lines

> There's one more change that was suggested that I'd like to propose:
> - Make "git grep" search the whole repository by default; include an
>   explicit "." path limiter to search only the current directory.
>
> In addition to being more consistent with other commands like "git log",
> this saves a lot of typing working in drivers/net/usb/ if the identifier
> you're looking for is in include/.  Typing the additional space-dot
> is pretty trivial if you want the current directory only.

I do not remember it was ever suggested, let alone coming to anything near consensus.

The only way you could justify such a default change is to say:

    Almost all the time, everybody wants to use this new behaviour; the
    old behaviour is almost never useful in any situation other than a
    narrow corner case; and if somebody wants to do such a useless thing
    in a corner case, he can always add " ." at the end, so nothing is
    lost.

I do not think that is true for the change you are proposing here. 'He can always add " ." at the end' alone is not a good enough justification.

I however think your use case deserves to be supported, and I would not mind at all accepting a new "--full-tree" (or some shorter synonym) option if the patch is cleanly done (hint, hint).

I'd rather not add this to "future changes that are backward incompatible" list. It may be a useful new feature, but that is not what the topic of this thread is about.