Re: [PATCH v3 2/3] git-push: clean up some of the output from git push --porcelain

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Feb 8, 2010, 22:21 UTC
Message-ID: <7viqa7cqs9.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20100208213256.GA470@coredump.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

> ... Which means that the original porcelain
> format was perhaps not very well thought-out.
> ...
> now whether to fix it and break compatibility, or leave it broken...

I think the purpose of the patches that started this thread was to admit that 1965ff7 (add --porcelain option to git-push, 2009-06-22) was not well thought out, and to break compatibility to fix it.

Having said that, I would say that what 1965ff7 specified was only these two:

    = TAB refs/heads/master:refs/heads/master TAB [up to date]
    - TAB :refs/heads/foobar TAB [deleted]

so everything else that do not match this pattern is a fair game, most importantly, the line that begins with "To" would not be mistaken with this pattern, I think.

Show 13 quoted lines

>> @@ -1071,7 +1071,8 @@ int transport_push(struct transport *transport,
>>  		}
>>  
>>  		if (!quiet && !ret && !refs_pushed(remote_refs))
>> -			fprintf(stderr, "Everything up-to-date\n");
>> +			fprintf(porcelain ? stdout : stderr,
>> +				"Everything up-to-date\n");
>>  		return ret;
>>  	}
>
> This one, on the other hand, seems to me to be just noise. What does a
> --porcelain caller learn by seeing "Everything up-to-date" that it did
> not already know from seeing the list of refs?

I do not care too much about this hunk either way. We could leave it as is, as we will be giving some other stuff to the standard error stream without squelching anyway, even with the three-patch series. We could squelch only this message, but it is dubious what it is buying us. If you forced me to decide, I would probably say "let's just drop this hunk and keep the code as-is".

As to the exit status, do you have any thoughts, by the way?

I am not convinced that it would be necessary nor even a good idea to make it behave inconsistently between the normal case and Porcelain case, only to make it easier to special case the "remote side would reject due to non-fast-forward" failure mode (iow, even if the calling script knows that it would fail due to non-fast-forward but otherwise everything else would be fine, what good would it do?)