Re: [PATCHv3 3/7] show: honor --textconv for blobs

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: May 13, 2013, 15:41 UTC
Message-ID: <7vhai6opju.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <5190FF73.1080606@drmicha.warpmail.net>

Michael J Gruber <git@drmicha.warpmail.net> writes:

> But you do have the possibility to use different drivers for diff and
> show. For example, for showing a file some sort of automatic pagination
> or line numbering can be helpful whereas it would hurt the diff case.

I do not find the example convincing (yet); it looks more like you are grasping for straws.

You would certainly do not want "line numbering" in grep. My gut feeling is that normal users would expect to have a single "text version" and pass that to "pr" (if they want pagination) or "cat -n" (if they want line numbering), regardless of where it comes from, be it "git show --textconv" or some other program output, but you seem to want to have different "text version"s for different purposes out of a single binary file....

> I strongly disagree here. I have textconv filters for pdf, gpg, odf,
> xls, doc, xoj... I know, ugly. At least some of them would benefit from
> different filteres or different settings.

.... and an example to show why it is useful would help here. I do not feel that I have seen anything to substantiate "at least some of them would benefit" yet.

Would it follow that "grep" and "cat-file" should be controlled by yet two other knobs so that optionally the user can use different "text version"s meant for them?

Show 12 quoted lines

> The way I propose it, a user would just have to add "show=foo" to the
> "diff=foo" lines without having to ad an extra filter, but with the
> flexibility to do so.
>
>> And of course for any workflow-oriented config, you will sometimes want
>> to override it for a particular operation. But that is why we have a
>> command-line escape hatch, and that part is already implemented.
>
> One may ask what a purely ui output oriented setting like "show" has to
> do in .gitattributes, of course, but that applies to "diff" as well.
> Separating the two (one in attributes, one in config) looks artificial
> to me.

I am not sure what you mean by "artificial", but the separation of the roles between attribute and config is not artificial at all. It is very much deliberate and done for a good reason.

The attribute specifies what the type of the file is project wide and is meant to go in in-tree .gitattrbute file, shared among people on different platforms. It says things like "These files are PDF".

The config specifies what should happen to the type of a file on a particular platform each user uses to work in the copy of the project, i.e. repository. It says things like "Pass PDF files through /opt/bin/pdf2txt", which obviously cannot be shared across platforms.