Re: [PATCH v3] rebase --merge: optionally skip upstreamed commits

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Mar 30, 2020, 16:49 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqq1rp9aiuv.fsf@gitster.c.googlers.com>
In-Reply-To: <e917f451-c00a-c819-7f78-888ba6e8f5ea@gmail.com>

Derrick Stolee <stolee@gmail.com> writes:

Show 11 quoted lines

>> +--keep-cherry-pick::
>> +--no-keep-cherry-pick::
>
> I noticed that this _could_ have been simplified to
>
> 	--[no-]keep-cherry-pick::
>
> but I also see several uses of either in our documentation. Do we
> have a preference? By inspecting the lines before a "no-" string,
> I see that some have these two lines, some use the [no-] pattern,
> and others highlight the --no-<option> flag completely separately.

"git log -S'--[no-]' Documentation/" (and its "-S'--no-'" variant) tell us that many of our recent commits do prefer the single-line form, but then in d333f672 (git-checkout.txt: spell out --no-option, 2019-03-29), we see we turned a handful of "--[no-]option" into "--option" followed by "--no-option" deliberately [*1*].

So, we do not seem to have a strong concensus.

I think all the new ones that spell --no-option:: out are the ones when --option:: and --no-option:: have their own paragraph, e.g. "--sign/--no-sign" of "git-tag".

As the differences do not matter all that much, I do not mind declaring (and one of the tasks of the maintainer is to make a declaration on such a choice that it matters more for us to pick either one and we all sticking to it, rather than which choice we make) that we'd prefer the expanded two-liner form (which when formatted would become a single line with two things on it) and mark the task to convert from '--[no-]option' as #leftoverbit.

Thanks for your attention to the details.

[Footnote]

*1* The justification given was that it makes is it is easier to search that way and it is less cryptic. Personally I do not think it matters that much. Even when trying to learn what the negated form does, nobody would look for "--no-keep-ch" to find the above paragraph. "keep-cherry-pick" would be what they would look for, with or without leading double-dashes.