Re: [PATCH 01/13] Use 'Git' in help messages

From: David Aguilar <davvid@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 24, 2013, 22:11 UTC
Message-ID: <CAJDDKr4sCBJs_Dq8MdfCJAH4wW7k0TtimW6B01wS6k0zcJ9XHQ@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7vr4k65box.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Sun, Feb 24, 2013 at 12:59 AM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 15 quoted lines

> David Aguilar <davvid@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> This is referring to "git the command", not "git the system",
>> so it should not be changed according to the rule that was
>> applied when many "git" strings were changed to "Git".
>
> That sounds like a sensible objection.
>
>> There are scripts, etc. in the wild that parse this output.
>> which is another reason we would not want to change this.
>
> Are there?  For what purpose?
>
> Especially when these are all _("l10n ready"), I find that somewhat
> unlikely.

A script might conditionally use new git behavior and parse the output of "git version" to determine whether or not it can use it. oh-my-zsh does this, for example [*].

Changing the git to Git is probably fine for some scripts that do something interesting based on the git version since they might be doing something simple like splitting the string on whitespace and taking the last element as the version number.

These won't be broken by this change, but this approach is already broken for a different reason. Apple's build of git prints "git version 1.7.12.4 (Apple Git-37)" so they would need to account for the last parens section optionally being there. Changing "git" to "Git" only breaks anyone that has assumed that they could get the version by doing s/git version// on the string.

I think being able to find the version at runtime is something that is typically used by packagers and folks that want to be portable across git versions. For these, it would be helpful to have a consistent and stable output that can be easily parsed.

By deciding to not mark these l10n ready and keeping the output consistent we could help that use case.

[*] I'm not saying this is a good idea or something that scripts should do, I'm just pointing out that it is done in practice, so it is worth considering their use cases.

-- 
David