Re: [PATCH] Support for configurable git command aliases (v2)

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Jun 4, 2006, 23:31 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0606041621010.5498@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <20060604212050.GV10488@pasky.or.cz>

On Sun, 4 Jun 2006, Petr Baudis wrote:

> 
> And I forgot to mention that it also adds the interactivity test
> requested by Janek - aliases are now interpreted only when stdout is a
> tty.

I don't think that's a good test.

The fact is, I do

	git diff | less -S

all the time, and if I start doing aliases, I'd expect them to work the same regardless of whether I piped the output to "less" or not.

Also, a lot of scripts have stdout going to the regular stdout, so I don't think it's even a sufficient test for scripting anyway.

So I would suggest some other way to suppress aliases if we need it, not based on "isatty()" and frields.

But I suspect that the easiest solution is to just disallow aliases of real built-ins. I realize it could be cool, but the fact is, it's also extremely confusing if "git diff" does something else than what it's supposed to do, and it _will_ break scripts.

The alternatives is to
 - not do aliases for the "git-xyzzy" format
 - and add a special environment flag ("GIT_NO_ALIASES") to allow scripts 
   to easily disable aliases (and add a "export GIT_NO_ALIASES" line to 
   the git-sh-setup.sh script)

Hmm?

		Linus