Re: Call Me Gitless

From: Daniel Barkalow <barkalow@iabervon.org>
Date: Aug 19, 2008, 19:42 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LNX.1.00.0808191523050.19665@iabervon.org>
In-Reply-To: <20080819190159.GB17943@coredump.intra.peff.net>

On Tue, 19 Aug 2008, Jeff King wrote:

Show 17 quoted lines

> On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 02:57:04PM -0400, Daniel Barkalow wrote:
> 
> > Humans being recipients of emails, or humans being the users who typed the 
> > command? Unless you're cut-and-pasting out of a pager (which never works 
> 
> I meant the recipients of the emails.
> 
> > well for me if it's long enough to include diff headers, context, and some 
> > change), recipients of emails would get what scripts get. (I personnaly do 
> > that as "git diff > temp.patch" and read temp.patch into my mailer; this 
> > doesn't trigger starting a pager, and wouldn't trigger the default to be 
> > informative prefixes.)
> 
> OK, I didn't read your mail carefully enough. Yes, I do the same thing,
> so the "do this only if pager" rule would meet my requirement. OTOH, I
> don't know if that would satisfy the people who want this feature (but I
> will let them speak for themselves).

Ah, okay. I feel like the main application for this is "I typed some git diff command, started looking at it, my phone rang, I took the call, and now I don't know what I'm looking at, and the pager hides the command line, but quitting the pager loses my place." At least, that's the situation I'm often in.

Show 8 quoted lines

> > Yeah, that's why I think that format-patch should work on content that you 
> > haven't committed, generating something you can dump right into an email 
> > (with the --- and diffstat that you'd get if you actually did commit and 
> > use format-patch now).
> 
> It's not clear to me:
> 
>   - how you would tell format-patch that's what you wanted to dump

Maybe an option? Maybe it should include it if the working tree is dirty?

>   - what parts would be included. There's no commit message or author.
>     We could guess at the author as if you were about to commit this.

Probably it should start just after the message, since that's what you've presumably got elsewhere.

>   - how this would be any real improvement over "git diff --stat -p". In
>     fact, I like the fact that I get _just_ the diff, which I then
>     paste. The headers would just be clutter I would have to delete.

That all-important "---" line? But I think the real advantage is that people who don't know that "git diff --stat -p" is the standard info for a patch email would be able to run the same command as usual.

	-Daniel
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