Re: [PATCH 6/7] builtin/describe.c: describe a blob

> From: "Junio C Hamano" <gitster@pobox.com>
> : Friday, November 10, 2017 1:24 AM
> [catch up]
>
>> "Philip Oakley" <philipoakley@iee.org> writes:
>>
>>> From: "Stefan Beller" <sbeller@google.com>
>>>> Rereading this discussion, there is currently no urgent thing to 
>>>> address?
>>>
>>> True.
>>>
>>>> Then the state as announced by the last cooking email, to just cook
>>>> it, seems
>>>> about right and we'll wait for further feedback.
>>
>> A shiny new toy that is not a fix for a grave bug is rarely urgent,
>> so with that criterion, we'd end up with hundreds of topics not in
>> 'next' but in 'pu' waiting for the original contributor to get out
>> of his or her procrastination, which certainly is not what I want to
>> see, as I'd have to throw them into the Stalled bin and then
>> eventually discard them, while having to worry about possible
>> mismerges with remaining good topics caused by these topics
>> appearing and disappearing from 'pu'.
>>
>> I'd rather see any topic that consumed reviewers' time to be
>> polished enough to get into 'next' while we all recall the issues
>> raised during previous reviews.  I consider the process to further
>> incrementally polish it after that happens a true "cooking".
>>
>> For this topic, aside from "known issues" that we decided to punt
>> for now, my impression was that the code is in good enough shape,
>> and we need a bit of documentation polishes before I can mark it
>> as "Will merge to 'next'".
>>
>>> Possibly only checking the documenation aspects, so folks don't fall
>>> into the same trap as me.. ;-)
>>
>> Yup, so let's resolve that documentation thing while we remember
>> that the topic has that issue, and what part of the documentation
>> we find needs improvement.
>>
>> I am not sure what "trap: you fell into, though.  Are you saying
>> that giving
>>
>> git describe [<option to describe a commit>...] <commit-ish>
>> git describe [<option to describe a blob>...] <blob>
>>
>> in the synopsis is not helpful, because the user may not know what
>> kind of object s/he has, and cannot decide from which set of options
>> to pick?  Then an alternative would be to list
>
> (If I remember correctly) My nit pick was roughly along the lines you 
> suggest, and that the two option lists (for commit-ish and blob) were 
> shown in different ways, which could lead to the scenarion that, with 
> knowing the

> oid object type (or knowing how to get it), the user could give an invalid 
> option, and think the command failure was because the oid was invalid, not 
> that the option was not appropriate, along with variations on that theme.
>
> The newer synopsis (v5) looks Ok in that it avoids digging the hole by not 
> mentioning the blob options. Personally I'm more for manuals that tend 
> toward instructional, rather than being expert references. I'd sneak in a 
> line saying "The object type can be determined using `git cat-file`.", but 
> maybe that's my work environment...
>
>>
>> git describe [<option>...] <object>
>>
>> in the synopsis, say upfront that most options are applicable only
>> when describing a commit-ish, and when describing a blob, we do
>> quite different thing and a separate set of options apply, perhaps?
>>
> --
> Philip