Re: [PATCH 5/5] format-patch: avoid freopen()

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Jun 21, 2016, 07:15 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.20.1606210906190.22630@virtualbox>
In-Reply-To: <xmqq4m8nvodo.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>

Hi Junio,

On Mon, 20 Jun 2016, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> You can probably sell "when giving out put to file, we will never color
> the output" as an improved new world order, but if that is what this
> change wants to do, it probably deserves a separate patch.
> 
> I however think you can avoid breaking expectations by people who are
> not so sensible by overriding only when use_color is set to
> GIT_COLOR_AUTO, perhaps?

That is a very convincing argument. So convincing that I wanted to change the patch to guard behind `diff_use_color_default == GIT_COLOR_AUTO`. But that is the wrong variable: the variable that *has* that default value is git_use_color_default, and is private to color.c.

But then I dug further to determine under which circumstances that variable can be reset to any different value. It turns out that in format-patch's case, it cannot:

	787570c (format-patch: ignore ui.color, 2011-09-13)

I hope you agree that it will be enough to augment the commit message with this analysis and keep the patch as-is (as per v2, that is)?

Ciao, Dscho