Re: [PATCH 4/4] remote: new show output style

From: Julian Phillips <julian@quantumfyre.co.uk>
Date: Feb 19, 2009, 18:58 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LNX.2.00.0902191850260.21164@reaper.quantumfyre.co.uk>
In-Reply-To: <76718490902190957td40d425p6b2ae1242060114d@mail.gmail.com>

On Thu, 19 Feb 2009, Jay Soffian wrote:

Show 30 quoted lines

> On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 11:03 AM, Marc Branchaud <marcnarc@xiplink.com> wrote:
>> First, a nit: I don't know if the "w/remote" notation makes sense to
>> non-English speakers.  I also like the alignment achieved by "merges with
>> remote " (note the trailing space).
>
> I tried out a few different option and none was very satisfactory to me.
>
> 1)
>    master            rebases onto remote master
>    another-branch    merges with remote  next
>    some-other-branch rebases onto remote master
>
> Here, the unaligned "with" and "onto" is ugly.
>
> 2)
>
>    master            rebases onto remote master
>    another-branch    merges  with remote next
>    some-other-branch rebases onto remote master
>
> This looks better to me. However, if none of your branches rebase,
> then the extra space looks like it is a mistake. e.g.:
>
>    master            merges  with remote master
>    another-branch    merges  with remote next
>    some-other-branch merges  with remote master
>
> I could add code to detect whether all the branches merge and then not
> output the space, but, sigh. And I couldn't think of any other
> combination of words that had the same character spacing.

or

3)

     master            rebases onto remote master
     another-branch     merges with remote next
     some-other-branch rebases onto remote master

perhaps, which doesn't look odd without the rebase lines?

Show 6 quoted lines

> So that's how I ended up with "merges w/remote". This is also slightly
> less wide. I always try to have output fit into 80 columns (how
> quaint, I know) and a merging branch might have multiple upstreams.
> e.g.
>
>   another-branch merges w/foo, bar, baz

or

    another-branch merges with foo
                      and with bar
                      and with baz

perhaps?

Show 6 quoted lines

> IOW, the output in the patch wasn't arbitrary. I did think about it
> quite a bit. Which isn't to say it's right, just it's the best I came
> up with.
>
> I'm somewhat confused by "w/remote" making sense to non-English
> speakers as it's English output.

But generally the output is not as idomatic as w/foo. If English is a non-native language then "with foo" is going to be much clearer - and if nothing else, much easier to lookup in a dictionary.

Show 15 quoted lines

>> Second, I think it would be good to also change the format of the 'git push'
>> list, for consistency:
>
> I left that out on purpose. The only folks with push refspecs put them
> their manually, and the raw refspec is clearer and more concise than
> any English words can convey. That was my reasoning anyway.
>
> Thanks for the feedback.
>
> j.
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-- 
Julian

  ---
"You're just the sort of person I imagined marrying, when I was little...
except, y'know, not green... and without all the patches of fungus."
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