Re: push.default documented in "man git-push"?

From: Matthieu Moy <matthieu.moy@grenoble-inp.fr>
Date: Oct 11, 2012, 14:18 UTC
Message-ID: <vpqhaq13xdq.fsf@grenoble-inp.fr>
In-Reply-To: <20121011124326.GA30589@do>

Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com> writes:

Show 7 quoted lines

> On Fri, Oct 05, 2012 at 01:03:28PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>
>> OK, the messages are supposed to advise how to turn them off, so we
>> would want some code updates in that case.
>
> Something like this? It turns out none of the advice messages says
> anything about advice.*.

Personally, I'm fine with the current situation. Advanced users can read the documentation, and for others, the messages are usually more helpful than annoying.

> This patch makes many output more verbose/annoying,

For example, it makes the output of git status look like:

# On branch master # Changes to be committed: # (use "git reset HEAD <file>..." to unstage) # Set advice.statusHints to false to turn off this message # # modified: foo.txt # # Changes not staged for commit: # (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed) # (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory) # Set advice.statusHints to false to turn off this message # # modified: foo.txt # # Untracked files: # (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed) # Set advice.statusHints to false to turn off this message # # bar.txt

I think it's going really too far in verbosity, the actual information is hidden by the advices.

> (which is good, more motivation to turn advice off).

I disagree. Having advices turned on doesn't harm anyone. I don't remember anyone complaining about the verbosity of Git's advices. I've seen *many* more people complaining about the user-unfriendliness of Git.

I'm fine with very verbose (and scary) messages when the user did something wrong (for example, the advice.implicitIdentity is something you should never see if you configured Git properly before commiting). But the user should not feel blamed for using the default configuration of advice messages. The tripple repetition in "git status" shown above really sounds like "hey, dumb user, why did you not set advice.statusHints already", and is doubly scary for newbies, because they are not told how to set the variable, nor what a config variable is to Git.

I understand the motivation of making the advice.* section of "man git-config" more easily discoverable, but then picking a reasonable subset of the advice messages (e.g. places that are already verbose anyway, and not places that total beginners would see on a daily basis like "git status") would be much better than targetting exhaustivity IMHO.

Show 7 quoted lines

> @@ -89,7 +90,9 @@ void detach_advice(const char *new_name)
>  	"state without impacting any branches by performing another checkout.\n\n"
>  	"If you want to create a new branch to retain commits you create, you may\n"
>  	"do so (now or later) by using -b with the checkout command again. Example:\n\n"
> -	"  git checkout -b new_branch_name\n\n";
> +	"  git checkout -b new_branch_name\n"
> +	"Set either advice.detachedHead to false to turn off this message\n\n"

             ^^^^^^

Wrong cut-and paste from "... either XXX or YYY ..."? (repeated several times below).

-- 
Matthieu Moy
http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~moy/