Re: [PATCH 0/4] grep: add more information to hunk separators

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Mar 26, 2012, 05:14 UTC
Message-ID: <7vr4wgq6zm.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <1332729705-9283-1-git-send-email-lodatom@gmail.com>

Mark Lodato <lodatom@gmail.com> writes:

Show 13 quoted lines

> Originally, I had envisioned also moving the function name (`-p') to the hunk
> header, similar to the diff context line.  For example:
>
>     -- git.c:570 -- int main(int argc, char argv)
>                     printf("usage: %s\n\n", git_usage_string);
>                     list_common_cmds_help();
>                     printf("\n%s\n", git_more_info_string);
>
> After implementing this feature, I was not happy with the result and
> subsequently removed it.  To me, the output was too cluttered and the line
> number was ambigous.  For example, in the above, it is not obvious to me that
> line 570 is the "printf" line and not the "int main" line.  Still, if you
> would like to see the patch to implement this feature, please let me know.

The worst part of all of the above is that the output becomes utterly ambiguous and the reader cannot tell if "-- git.c..." came because the file had such a line that begin with two dashes in it and grep found it, or it is your output format embellishment. It is obvious that these are not meant to be machine parseable, but if the goal is to make the output more useful to the humans, then it may be a better approach to come up with a front end that reads our machine readable output and shows output with its own embellishments. You could even make it an interactive front end.

In other words, I am not yet convinced this belongs to "git grep" proper.