Re: A tour of git: the basics (and notes on some unfriendly messages)

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Sep 29, 2007, 22:25 UTC
Message-ID: <7vlkapjeir.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <E5C688F2-4A8D-402A-9757-5007BE4A8B25@zib.de>

Steffen Prohaska <prohaska@zib.de> writes:

> Quite often git prints a lot of very technical information that
> is not very interesting as long as things succeed without error.
> Some examples are
> - git fetch (see above)

Probably.

> - git rebase: prints a lot of details that I'm not interested in
>   unless the rebase fails.

Yes. Most of the clutter is coming from "am" which also should be squelched.

Saying

	Switched to branch <blah>

is good when the branch to rebase is specified.

	"HEAD is now at ..."
is not useful -- it is a side effect of rewinding the head to
the --onto commit.

	<blank line>
        Applying <patch subject>
	<blank line>
        Wrote tree <tree object>
        Committed: <commit object>

are coming from "am" for each patch. We could squelch these into just one "Applying <patch subject>" and nothing else, which would also help making "am" quieter.

> - git push: prints updates of remote heads. A message about
>   failing to update a remote head may get lost.

Please do not remove the report of successful update, as people often say "git push" or "git push $there" without explicitly saying which refs to push. When pushing out to publish, I say "git push ko" (to mean k.org) and I _want_ my positive feedback.

Show 5 quoted lines

> - git merge: the fact that a merge is a fast forward merge gets
>   printed at the very top, followed by (often a lot of) diffstat.
>   I know diffstat can help to judge if the merge did what you
>   expected. But even more important is the fact that the merge
>   was just a fast forward, which may get buried under lots of output.

I do not think fast-forwardness is particularly interesting. If you find fast-forwardness interesting, I suspect you would even want to know what _your_ change that were not in the other side of the merge, which is something that we do not even report right now.

> Maybe git should become more quiet, as other unix tools are, and
> per default only report problems. Technical details and progress
> could be requested explicitly by '--verbose' or similar.

I'd agree with this sentiment in principle, and many of the things you propose to remove above fall into the "unnecessary clutter" category. But some of the existing output fall into the "necessary info" category --- diffstart after merge and report of successful remote ref updates are such things, so we should be careful not to go overboard.