Re: [PATCH] send-email: disable option auto-abbreviation
> Kyle Meyer <kyle@kyleam.com> writes:
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>> fatal: ambiguous argument '3': unknown revision or path not in the
>> working tree. [...]
>>
>> Disable Getopt's auto-abbreviation feature so that such options are
>> properly relayed to format-patch. With this change, there is some
>> risk of breaking external scripts that rely on the abbreviation, but
>> that is hopefully unlikely given that Git does not advertise support
>> for auto-abbreviation and most subcommands do not support it.
>
> I personally have no sympathy to those who drive "format-patch" from
> inside "send-email".
I'm not one of those users myself, but I was prompted to look into this by a report of the above error on another mailing list [*]. I do sympathize with "skip the explicit format-patch" users that find that error confusing.
[*] https://yhetil.org/guix-patches/20221123190710.26517-1-paren@disroot.org
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> Many subcommands of "git" do take uniquely abbreviated double-dashed
> option names, but it is true that we do not allow --vanything to be
> given as -v even when there is no other double-dashed option that
> begins with 'v', so "git send-email -v" that stands for "git
> send-email --validate" indeed is an odd thing.
Thanks for the correction. I didn't realize that many subcommands supported abbreviated options. I expected it to be, at most, the remaining ones written in Perl. When I tried out a couple of commands, I convinced myself that auto-abbreviation wasn't generally supported:
$ git log --onelin
fatal: unrecognized argument: --onelin
$ git diff --histog
error: invalid option: --histog
But I didn't look hard enough. Trying again, I stumbled onto a few counterexamples (e.g., `git status --shor` works and so does `git range-diff --le ...`).
And my claim in the commit message that "Git does not advertise support for auto-abbreviation" is wrong. I've now found this bit in gitcli(7):
Abbreviating long options
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Commands that support the enhanced option parser accepts unique
prefix of a long option as if it is fully spelled out, but use this
with a caution. For example, `git commit --amen` behaves as if you
typed `git commit --amend`, but that is true only until a later version
of Git introduces another option that shares the same prefix,
e.g. `git commit --amenity` option.
> But robbing "git send-email --val" that expands to "--validate" from
> the users is going a bit too far, I am afraid.
Fair enough. For the reasons above, the last sentence I wrote in the commit message is invalid and can't justify the change.
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> The right solution for allowing "-v 3" given to "format-patch" I think
> is to make send-email understand it and pass that through. The
> presence of both ("validate" => \$validate) and ("v" =>
> \$reroll_count) in the GetOptions() argument would prevent "-v" to be
> taken as "--validate" while still allowing "--val" to be used as an
> abbrevatiion, no?I'd think that would work, yes. I'll look more into going this route.
With that approach, there are other cases of abbreviation intercepting valid format patch options. For example, send-email doesn't have the short option -n while format-patch does, but that doesn't make it through to format-patch:
$ git send-email --dry-run -n @{u} | grep Subj
Subject: [PATCH] send-email: disable option auto-abbreviation $ git send-email --dry-run --numbered @{u} | grep Subj
Subject: [PATCH 1/1] send-email: disable option auto-abbreviation> By the way, do we advertise support for any and all options to
> format-patch when the feature to drive it from send-email is used?
> Some of the options (e.g. "-o <directory>") do not make any sense in
> the context I would suspect.
Passing an -o to send-email would cause its format-patch call to fail because send-email uses -o internally:
$ git send-email --dry-run -o . @{u}
fatal: two output directories?
format-patch -o /tmp/W1ZGCr0hwv -o @{u}: command returned error: 128In any case, here's the only relevant part I spot from git-send-email(1):
Patches can be specified as files, directories (which will send all
files in the directory), or directly as a revision list. In the last
case, any format accepted by linkgit:git-format-patch[1] can be passed
to git send-email, as well as options understood by
linkgit:git-format-patch[1].
So, there's no mention that some options like -o do not make sense in the send-email context, but perhaps that's obvious enough (at least in my view it's much more obvious than '-v 3' and -n not being valid).
Thanks for the review.
Kyle Meyer
