Re: [PATCH v2] clean: add --null option

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Apr 16, 2012, 20:14 UTC
Message-ID: <7vehrntowg.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <1334480962-18778-1-git-send-email-rosslagerwall@gmail.com>

Ross Lagerwall <rosslagerwall@gmail.com> writes:

> Add a --null (-z) option to git-clean which prints out the files
> and directories separated with a NUL character rather than '\n'.
> This makes it useful in conjunction with xargs -0.

Hrm, I do not like this at all.

The parameters to print_path() are all _("l10n-ready string"). Isn't it a clue already that they are not meant for machine consumption? Why are we moving to cast the output from an end-user facing Porcelain command in stone?

I suspect that older days "git clean" was a scripted Porcelain around a plumbing (perhaps ls-files?---I didn't bother digging its history as I do not care too deeply about "git clean" which I do not use myself). If we have piled so many features into "git clean" after the rewrite-to-C to make it impossible to express what "git clean" _would_ do in terms of "ls-files", perhaps that is what needs to be fixed, so that we can express "git clean --some-set-of-options" as:

    git ls-files -z --set-of-options-equivalent-to-what-is-given-to-clean |
    xargs -0 rm -fr