Re: Extra blank lines in "git status" output have been reduced

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Mar 17, 2021, 20:18 UTC
Message-ID: <YFJkJvJdO5XsrvO/@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqo8fhtvst.fsf@gitster.g>

On Wed, Mar 17, 2021 at 12:38:42PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 20 quoted lines

> Pete Boere <pete@duel.me> writes:
> 
> > With the release of v2.23 I have noticed from the commit:
> > 7b098429355bb3271f9ffdf73b97f2ef82794fea
> > ...
> > Is there any chance of adding them back? The changed layout has been
> > throwing me off ever since upgrading.
> 
> Sorry, but it is way too late to complain, generally after a change
> hits a release, and especially after it got buried under 8 new major
> releases.  Unless a change was an unintended side-effect that we did
> not mean to make, in which case we would likely to fix it as a bug.
> 
> And the change in question b2f5171e (status: remove the empty line
> after hints, 2019-06-04) quite deliberately targets at removing
> these extra lines [*], so no, I do not think it is reasonable to
> expect reverting that commit that is more than a year old.
> 
> You may want to join the list discussion and stop whatever UI change
> you find undesirable before it materializes next time.

If we discover later that some portion of users prefer an older behavior, it may be reasonable to build on top with a config option to allow selecting the old or the new. The inputs to "may be reasonable" there are:

  - how big is the code burden to support both behaviors? In this case,
    I don't think it's too bad; it's restoring the old newlines with a
    conditional

  - how many people would actually care enough to set the option? Even
    without a lot of code, each option is _some_ burden to carry, both
    in the code and in the overall complexity of the interface. I'm less
    convinced in this particular case that a lot of people care (given a
    single comment after many releases), but perhaps those interested in
    the change could produce data (note I said "data", not "argue more
    vigorously" ;) ).

    It might help justify such an option if it applied in more places.
    E.g., an option for "I prefer the look of lots of whitespace in
    messages" versus "I prefer a more compact look".

-Peff