Re: [PATCH] add --porcelain option to git-push

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jun 23, 2009, 15:50 UTC
Message-ID: <7v4ou79cga.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <4A40EF9C.7000706@xiplink.com>

Marc Branchaud <marcnarc@xiplink.com> writes:

> Shouldn't this option be named "--plumbing" since it's making 'git push'
> act like plumbing?  Actually, neither name seems intuitively descriptive
> to me...

Perhaps. But asking for output format designed for Porcelain implementions to read with --porcelain option has precedence.

> Why not teach 'git push' to change its output format if it's writing to a pipe?

That is ugly. Besides, "writing to a pipe" would not be a right criteria, if you want to do

          git push >log
          if grep blah log
          then
                do blah thing
          fi
          if grep baa log
          then
                do baa thing, too
          fi

When you make a program behave differently depending on where your stdout goes, typically you see if it is going to the terminal (e.g. isatty(3)), but even then you would need an explicit override from the command line when stdout is a tty and you do not want "for humans" frills (e.g. color), and when stdout is not a tty and you do want such frills.