Re: What's cooking in git.git (Feb 2013, #05; Tue, 12)

From: Andrew Ardill <andrew.ardill@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 14, 2013, 04:54 UTC
Message-ID: <CAH5451mMG-U8qETAy_6pRJLbtOjtAPhbapVA9RLbrrS2yy7rCw@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7vtxpf341w.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On 14 February 2013 15:36, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

>> That is, currently git add defaults to not staging file deletions, and
>> we provide command line flags to include them. The consensus in the
>> thread is that it is better to stage them by default; it seems
>> reasonable to me that if we stage deletions by default we should
>> provide flags to _not_ stage them. If that was the entirety of the
>> change, would your position from that thread, "if we need this
>> optional, then it is not worth doing this", still hold?
>
> If that is the change we are going to make, and if you can guarantee
> that nobody who is used to the historical behaviour will complain,
> then I am fine with it, but I think the latter part of the condition
> will not hold.

Does the impossibility of asserting that no-one will complain put this in the 'too hard' bucket?

Show 14 quoted lines

>> Some people would be adversely affected by this change, but any
>> objections I can come up with are not game stoppers.
>> - It is possible newcomers might stumble at deleted files being staged
>> for commit by a command called 'add',...
>
> New people are fair game; we haven't trained them with the
> "inconsistent" behaviour, and the default being different from
> historical behaviour will not affect them adversely.
>
>> - For people who rely heavily on file deletions remaining out of the
>> index, providing a flag allows them to keep their workflow.
>
> Allowing to do the things they used to be able to do is a bare
> minimum.  You are still forcing them to do things differently.

The implication here is that a relatively small number of people will be inconvenienced by needing to specify extra flags/set up an alias. Compare this to the many for whom the expected behaviour is now default, and we have a net win.

>> Finally, making this change makes sense from a consistency point of
>> view.
>
> That is a given. Otherwise we wouldn't be even discussing this.

Obviously I agree. I was actually bringing up a point about patch mode and it got incorporated into the bigger picture; patch mode includes deletions by default and I don't even know if you can turn that behaviour off. So, when we talk about git add -u and git add -A, we should also mention git add -p.

Regards,

Andrew Ardill