Re: git grep: search whole tree by default?

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Oct 23, 2013, 17:23 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqmwlzrjdh.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <vpqbo2guff7.fsf@anie.imag.fr>

Matthieu Moy <Matthieu.Moy@grenoble-inp.fr> writes:

Show 10 quoted lines

> In summary: changing is painful. The case of "git add" was really bad,
> since the same command had different behavior depending on the options
> given, so it was clearly worth the pain. In the case of "git grep", the
> current behavior is not _that_ bad, so nobody bothered to do the change.
>
> (by "do the change", I mean propose a migration plan, convince people
> that it is good, ...)
>
> I'd personally be slightly in favor of changing to tree-wide, but
> without strong opinion.

After reading that old thread again, I tend to think that the only reason to favor "git grep" to start at the $(cwd) is the backward compatibility. While I do expect that many people will be annoyed when "git grep" (no pathspecs) that is run in a subdirectory starts spitting out a large number of hits from places irrelevant for the current task at hand, hits from outside the $(cwd) is something they can _notice_ easily and their fingers will quickly learn to add "." without even thinking.

I suspect that it would be too late for 2.0 we want to do sometime early next year, though.