Re: [PATCH 2/6] show: obey --textconv for blobs

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Apr 22, 2013, 15:25 UTC
Message-ID: <7vwqrupoy2.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20130421033710.GA18890@sigill.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

Show 13 quoted lines

> Just my two cents as a reviewer.
>
>> My reasoning is twofold:
>> 
>> - consistency between "git show commit" and "git show blob"
>
> I'm not sure I agree with this line of reasoning. "git show commit" is
> showing a diff, not the file contents; textconv has always been about
> munging the contents to produce a textual diff. It may be reasonable to
> extend its definition to "this is the preferred human view of this
> content, and that happens to be what you would want to produce a diff".
> But I do not think it is necessarily inconsistent not to apply it for
> the blob case.

True. Applying textconv to otherwise unreadable blobs is often useful, but I agree that it is unexpected if it is done by default, especially given that many people have learned to do:

	git show HEAD~4:binary-gob >old-binary-gob

to recover old version of binary contents to a temporary file when checking the sanity of or restoring the breakage in the new one.

It of course does _not_ forbid

	git show --textconv HEAD~4:binary-gob | less

but I doubt it is a good idea to turn it on by default this late in the game.