Re: [PATCH] grep: provide a noop --recursive option

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Sep 29, 2018, 17:11 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqq8t3k9qjs.fsf@gitster-ct.c.googlers.com>
In-Reply-To: <20180929145527.23444-1-avarab@gmail.com>

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason  <avarab@gmail.com> writes:

Show 6 quoted lines

> This --recursive (-r) option does nothing, and is purely here to
> appease people who have "grep -r ..." burned into their muscle memory.
>
> Requested-by: Christoph Berg <myon@debian.org>
> Signed-off-by: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
> ---

I personally am not all that sympathetic to the "'git grep' and 'grep' sound similar, so even though it won't do anything useful just add a synonym to noop" line of reasoning. That will lead to sloppy noop, and will invite unbound amount of busywork to deal with future complaints like "oh, but 'grep GNU COPYING' does not give useless filename in front like the same command line with 'git' prefixed; please fix 'git grep'" (which we'd have to say "no", wasting our time).

I however do not mind if we added "--recursive" with matching "--no-recursive", and

 - made "--recursive" the default (obviously)

 - made "--no-recursive" a synonym to setting the recursion limit
   to "never recurse"

 - and made "--recursive" a synonym to setting the recursion limit
   to "infinity".

That would be more work than this patch. But if I see "--recursive" advertised as a feature, and the command by default goes recursive, I do expect to be able to tell it not to recurse.

I also expect folks who are used to "git grep --re<TAB>" to summon the only option of the command that begins with that prefix to start complaining that they now have to type "--recurs<TAB>" instead. I am not solving that with the above suggestion to improve the suggested "noop".