Re: About git pretty
- From
- David Tweed <david.tweed@gmail.com>
- Date
- Aug 23, 2008, 00:34 UTC
- Message-ID
- <e1dab3980808221734l470134d3u62bd708e7baabe0d@mail.gmail.com>
- In-Reply-To
- <7v4p5c612y.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 1:12 AM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
Show 22 quoted lines
> "David Tweed" <david.tweed@gmail.com> writes: > >> On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 12:41 AM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote: >>> "Felipe Contreras" <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> writes: >>>> It is just me or 'pretty full' doesn't exactly convey the meaning of >>>> the action to execute? >> [snip] >>>> If you like the idea I can work on a patch. >>> >>> FWIW, I don't like it. >> >> It's probably much too late to change conventions given the number of >> deployed scripts, but one of the annoyances for me about git is that a >> lot of the commands/options names are based on what the code does/is >> written rather than relating to what a user who doesn't know or care >> about the inner workings expects as output. For instance, I imagine >> the --pretty gets its name because a pretty printing routine, called >> pretty_print_commit in the code,... > > It's the other way around. We name function pretty_print_commit() because > we would want to pretty print out output and the option to trigger the > behaviour then is named --pretty.
The point I was making is that, to my understanding, pretty-printing is the "standard" term _programmers_ think of when they're thinking about writing routines for doing sophisticated output formatting. I doubt that anyone who isn't an experienced programmer associates the term "pretty printing" naturally with "configuring output layout". I was talking about options that would make sense for someone who's not a hardcore programmer but for whom using git would be beneficial, so I didn't include git-diff for criticism because to be able to use the output you've got to be familiar with the diff program already, and hence know the name.
(My undergrad degree was in mathematics and I only slowly picked up computer jargon as I moved into computer research. Git would have been useful to me long before I happened across some papers on pretty printing, and I ended up learning what fsck in general means from trying to figure out what the hell the faux-swearing you get on the internet was. I could probably have gone on in ignorance of the concept unix people encapsulate with "fsck" otherwise.)
My point is that the terms that come naturally to hardcore programmers are opaque to people who might benefit from git.
Being honest, my only serious issue was with git reset. The about the first five times I knew the "operation" I wanted to perform by carefully checked the man-page because I wasn't sure whether --hard or --soft corresponded to the operation I wanted.
-- cheers, dave tweed__________________________ david.tweed@gmail.com Rm 124, School of Systems Engineering, University of Reading. "while having code so boring anyone can maintain it, use Python." -- attempted insult seen on slashdot