Re: [PATCH 0/2] branch: introduce --current display option

From: Daniels Umanovskis <daniels@umanovskis.se>
Date: Oct 10, 2018, 16:29 UTC
Message-ID: <d6e8a7a4-2de1-7ffe-2848-d372cb550a2d@umanovskis.se>
In-Reply-To: <87woqpetd3.fsf@evledraar.gmail.com>

On 10/10/18 5:03 PM, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> 
> I'm mildly negative on this because git-rev-parse is plumbing, but
> git-branch is porcelain [..]
> 
> We also list git-rev-parse as porcelain, just under "Porcelain / Ancillary
> Commands / Interrogators".
> 
> Should we just move it to plumbing? I don't know.

From my perspective as a Git user, not developer, git-rev-parse is between plumbing and porcelain, but much more plumbing. It's listed as porcelain but is connected to the plumbing git-rev-list, and for the most part it does things incomprehensible without understanding Git internals. Then it also has a bunch of options that are very useful in scripts but unrelated to revisions, here I mean --git-dir or --is-inside-work-tree.

I'd be happy to submit a documentation patch for discussion that formally moves rev-parse to plumbing.

Show 5 quoted lines

> Also, as much as our current scripting interface can be very confusing
> (you might not think "get current branch" is under rev-parse), I can't
> help but think that adding two different ways to spew out the exact same
> thing to two different commands is heading in the wrong
> direction.

Agreed, so I'm very much inclined to move forward with Junio's preferred solution on this, which would also act differently by only outputting the branch when you're really on a branch, and being silent in e.g. detached HEAD.