Re: What's in git.git (stable)

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Dec 14, 2006, 06:29 UTC
Message-ID: <7vy7pb9eit.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0612132231050.18171@xanadu.home>

Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org> writes:

Show 8 quoted lines

> On Thu, 14 Dec 2006, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
>
>> I sent a patch which makes "git show" have that functionality, and 
>> frankly, I disagree "less" would be a good name for it. It uses the 
>> _pager_, which is not always "less", and besides, what it does is to show 
>> that particular blob. So obviously, I think my patch is the best approach.
>
> I think your approach is pretty sensible too.

I think so too for a few reasons.

 * cat-file is a very low level plumbing.  Giving it -p was a
   mistake made by somebody lazy long time ago back when we were
   not all that hot about "user friendliness in Porcelain-ish"
   (the option -p was not originally even meant to be the user
   level; it was merely a helper feature for verify-tag).

 * If we were to call something 'cat' and make a user-level
   command, adding the feature to 'show' is a lot more sensible
   than cat-file; the former takes more than one args already.
   People expect 'cat' to concatenate the arguments.  cat-file
   doesn't.

 * Throwing ls-tree output is the most sensible thing to do at
   'cat-file -p <tree-ish>' level, but not at the UI level (Andy
   compared ls-tree with 'svn list' today).  With 'git show', it
   would be more natural to show ls-tree --name-only by default
   for tree-ish objects, and control the verbosity level with
   command line option.

One minor issue we may need to decide is what to do when show is given a tag object. Personally I think the current behaviour of dereferencing it to commit is fine (people who want to see the tag can always do 'git-verify-tag -v').