patchDocumentation/git-merge: at least one <remote> not two

Make SYNOPSIS match usage message

Signed-off-by: jidanni <jidanni@jidanni.org>
---
 Documentation/git-merge.txt |    2 +-
 1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)

jidanni@jidanni.org writes:

The original uses ellipses for the first-class UI syntax as "zero or more", while it means "one or more" in the description for the original syntax, which is inconsistent, and you are matching them by making both use "one or more" interpretation.

Two issues:

 * Are there similar breakages like this in the documentation and the
   usage text?  It would be a good idea to make the ellipses to mean the
   same thing everywhere, and a janitorial patch series that would fix
   the "ellipses" breakage (and nothing else) may be a good thing to
   have.  But before going that route...

 * Is it a good idea to standardize on "one or more" semantics?  I suspect
   we would rather want to standardize on "zero or more", because it would
   be more natural to say:

    $ git diff [--] <paths>...

   to mean "You can give paths if you want to but you do not have to".  If
   ellipses meant "one or more", you have to say this instead:

    $ git diff [--] [<paths>...]

While I prefer "zero or more" because I think it is more logical, if the preparatory study for the first issue reveals that we use "one or more" a lot more often, it might be easier to standardize on that interpretation.

Oh, you also need to give ellipses to the usage string for the original syntax in builtin-merge.c to match SYNOPSIS and usage string.

Thanks.

On 2009-01-01, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

For what it is worth, I have always understood "..." to mean "more of the preceding", meaning "one or more". That is your first example above.

Zero or more is your second syntax above, because the whole thing is in brackets, and hence completely optional.

In regex terms (to me anyway):

a? == [a] a+ == a... a* == [a...]