Re: [PATCH] make description of "core.autocrlf" less ambiguous

From: Will Palmer <wmpalmer@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 14, 2010, 14:49 UTC
Message-ID: <m2p5b9751661004140749kf97d84f8ufee365390e1c57f5@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7vk4saqguf.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 2:55 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

> Very low level plumbing commands deliberately omit the conversion in order
> to show the raw data (e.g. cat-file), so it is not correct to reword it to
> "when output" as in your version.

Blame poor testing on my part, then. Yesterday, my tests showed "cat-file blob HEAD:a-crlf-file" outputting crlf lines, but today (with a script, rather than my typing commands in by-hand) that seems not to be the case.

I agree that verbose-and-anal is not the right way to go, but I still think the phrases reading from / writing to "the filesystem" sound very ambiguous, especially when related to a command which effects the way git stores things in its internal filesystem.

Most other uses of the term "filesystem" in the manpage use wording
such as: "...filesystems like NFS..",
 "..filesystems like FAT..", "traditional UNIX filesystems", etc. The
only non-explicit uses of the term talk about
"slow filesystems", which are clearly talking about something other
than git. The autocrlf mention is the only use of the
term "the filesystem".

Though at the time I thought I wasn't being anal enough, perhaps the correct move would be to go the opposite direction: technically not the-real-truth, but "good enough": maybe both references to "the filesystem" should just be replaced with "the work tree", which is the term used in the safecrlf section anyway?