From: Junio C Hamano Date: Fri, 27 Feb 2009 19:59:32 GMT Subject: Re: [WARNING] Proposed future changes that are backward incompatible Message-ID: <7v3adzk5wb.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org> In-Reply-To: <20090227192708.6266.qmail@science.horizon.com> "George Spelvin" writes: > 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.