From: Phil Hord Date: Mon, 04 Jun 2012 18:00:26 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCHv5 1/3] wt-status.*: better advices for git status added Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <7vy5o72cnm.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org> On Fri, Jun 1, 2012 at 12:57 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote: > Phil Hord writes: > >>   $ git status --sequencer >>   You have unmerged paths. >>   You are in an am session. >>   You are in the middle of an interactive rebase. >> >>   $ git status --porcelain --sequencer >>   airu >> >> The "--porcelain --sequencer" combination I am imagining here would >> show the status as a script-parseable sequence of single-letter >> indicators telling the status of these same various conditions: >>   u - unmerged paths >>   a - git-am session >>   i - interactive rebase >>   r - rebase >>   c - cherry-pick >>   m - merge >> etc. > > Some people seem to think that machine-readable has to mean > unreadable cryptic line noises.  It's a disease. > > If you have to write "etc.", you clearly do not know what the > range of possible values of these things will eventually be. > > And I do not think it is your fault not to know what we would want > to add in the future.  But it is your fault to choose unreadable > cryptic line noises as an output format. > > Just spell them out, and do not mark them for translation. I agree. And I waffled a bit between single-letter indicators, abbreviated token-words, and fully spelled out words as you suggested. But I do think about future spelling or wording corrections (see --indexed and http-referer), and I opted for letters in this example. Thanks for the suggestion. If I push this along, I'll use words and let the list sort out the spellings. Phil