Re: [PATCH v3] add --abbrev to 'git cherry'

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: May 30, 2009, 23:08 UTC
Message-ID: <7v63fiyyrz.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <780e0a6b0905301413o2686fe34qaa076209c26c0b55@mail.gmail.com>

Stephen Boyd <bebarino@gmail.com> writes:

> You might want to look at using the parse options API. It has options
> for verbose and abbrev builtin, so you don't have to do any extra
> work....

Why do people even think a change like this to a _plumbing_ command is desirable?

Admittedly, there already is "verbose" option that adds redundant information to the output of this particular plumbing, which might arguably be equally wrong as what this patch does, but I think it is excusable. At least it lets the Porcelain script that uses the command avoid calling 'git cat-file commit' to find out the title of the commit.

But --abbrev does not even add any information. If implemented correctly (which earlier iteration did not even do), it may not lose information by choping the output too short to make it ambiguous, but as others pointed out about using grep in the calling Porcelain to filter (or more likely, sift the lines into "+" and "-" bins) to shoot down -d/-D options, I do not see the point of adding --abbrev to this plumbing command very much.