Re: allowing aliases to override builtins to support default options

Hi,

On Fri, 6 Mar 2009, Jay Soffian wrote:

> For example, what if:
> 
> 1. The aliases applied only to porcelain commands, not to plumbing.

Inconsistency like this is bad for a couple of reasons. Just 3 out of them:

- it makes it hard for users to understand,

- it is prone for subtle breakages,

- the code will be complicated, and therefore ugly.

> 2. The aliases worked only if stdout was a terminal, using the same 
>    method that git uses for detecting when it is okay to start a pager.

This would be even more complicated to understand for the regular Git user who just wants to use the darned thing and not care about its internals.

> 3. git took --alias-builtins and --no-alias-builtins just like it takes 
>    --paginate and --no-pager to override (2).

And this makes it even more complicated.

I'd rather stay with our current notion that aliases cannot override Git programs. This is _very_ easy to explain, and also _very_ easy to defend.

Ciao, Dscho