Re: [PATCH 2/2 (v3)] reset: make the output more user-friendly.

From: Matthieu Moy <matthieu.moy@imag.fr>
Date: Aug 23, 2009, 10:42 UTC
Message-ID: <vpqiqgevmju.fsf@bauges.imag.fr>
In-Reply-To: <7vmy5r1cpo.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

Show 5 quoted lines

> Two conflicting/competing thoughts come to mind:
>
>  1. Perhaps we should add a similar "explanation" for the list of paths
>     with changes upon switching branches with "git checkout" for
>     consistency.

Actually, I had never paid much attention to this message for checkout. Just checked, and I got it wrong too ;-). I thought checkout was showing me the files it was modifying, that wasn't it.

That said, I'm not a heavy user of local branches, so I'm a bad judge on what should be the behavior.

>  2. Such an "explanation" of what the output means would help the first
>     time people, but would everybody stay "first time" forever?  Would the
>     explanation become just another wasted line in valuable screen real
>     estate after people gain experience?

Yes, and this is a much more general issue than just checkout/reset. For example, the output of 'git status' is very nice to newbies:

  # On branch master
  # Changed but not updated:
  #   (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
  #   (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)
  #
  #       modified:   git.c
  #
  no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")

But out of these 8 lines, only two contain real informations, and the (use "git bla") are just noise to expert users.

I've been thinking of a configuration option, like "core.expertuser" or "ui.expertuser" that would let users disable these informative messages on demand. I'm not sure how good the idea is.

-- Matthieu