Re: git silently ignores aliases of existing commands

From: demerphq <demerphq@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 18, 2009, 11:20 UTC
Message-ID: <9b18b3110907180420n67ec7fa1q4a0df2047f37435e@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20090718105855.GA29567@coredump.intra.peff.net>

2009/7/18 Jeff King <peff@peff.net>:

Show 22 quoted lines

> On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 12:55:26PM +0200, demerphq wrote:
>
>> > The silentness makes it harder to diagnose problems, but even with a
>> > warning, we can break things by creating new commands. If you have an
>> > alias "foo" and we ship "git-foo" in a newer version of git, your alias
>> > will just stop working.
>>
>> That was my point. At least if there were warnings about this the risk
>> would be mitigated.
>
> I don't see how it's mitigated. You don't get any warning until _after_
> things are broken. So yes, it may help you diagnose the breakage, but
> presumably the fact that the command is doing something completely
> different would also alert you to the breakage.
>
> The real problem comes from scripted use, where you don't necessarily
> have a user reading warnings on stderr, or notice that some totally
> bogus code is being run (especially if said code happens not to produce
> a non-zero exit code).
>
> But perhaps that's what you meant, and I'm just nitpicking your
> language.

I think we are more or less in agreement, except maybe that i think the situation would be marginally better if git detected this.

:-)

Seems an awkward position actually. Maybe a switch like --ignore-command-aliases which would be used by all internal commands when they expect to find another internal command would resolve it. Then aliases of internal commands to control default switches could actually be allowed to work, and there would not be the future compatibility trap that there seems to be now.

cheers, Yves

-- 
perl -Mre=debug -e "/just|another|perl|hacker/"