Re: Redirect "git" subcommand to itself?

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: May 28, 2015, 01:53 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqoal5ii21.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAGZ79kZHa9wUrRsWfHgGdSdx+cN9VAirAAfu3YLVTuSmggcehg@mail.gmail.com>

Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com> writes:

Show 22 quoted lines

> so I just run into this problem again (which happens to me maybe twice a week):
> I want to do a git operations, so I type "git " into my shell, and
> then I look around what
> exactly I want to do and usually I find it in the help text of a
> previous command such as
>     You are currently reverting commit 383c14b.
>       (fix conflicts and run "git revert --continue")
>       (use "git revert --abort" to cancel the revert operation)
>
> then I copy the whole operation "git revert --abort" in this case and
> paste it to the shell
> and let go.
> The result looks like
>     $ git git revert --abort
>     git: 'git' is not a git command. See 'git --help'.
>
>     Did you mean this?
>     init
>
> I wonder if we want to make a "git" subcommand, which behaves exactly
> the same as git itself?
> Then "git git git status" would just return the same as "git status".

A few unrelated thoughts.

 * Perhaps we should omit 'git' from these advice-texts?  E.g.

     use "revert --abort" to cancel

   I dunno.

 * While we bend over backwards to a certain degree to be helpful, I
   somehow feel making "git git" a synonym to "git" is going too
   far, akin to asking POSIX maintainers to define "act", "cta",
   "atc", "tca", and "tac" all as synonyms to "cat" because you
   often fat-finger when typing "cat" (yes, "tac" does something
   else that is more useful, I know).

 * You can help yourself with something like this, I suppose:

   [alias]
	git = "!sh -c 'exec git \"$@\"' -"

   but I personally feel that it is too ugly to live as part of our
   official suggestion, so please do not send a patch to add it as
   a built-in alias ;-).