Unbalanced closing paren in help of git commit

Hello List

The second line of the help message for git commit looks like this:

    [--dry-run] [(-c | -C | --squash) <commit> | --fixup [(amend|reword):]<commit>)]

See for example https://gitirc.eu/git-commit.html. It has two opening parens and three closing parens. <commit> ends with a closing paren before the closing bracket. Me and gsish (on IRC) suspect this is a misstake.

What do you think?

Please reply all, not suscribed to the list.

Best regards -- Tomas

On Sun, Jul 07, 2024 at 12:33:21PM +0000, Tomas Nordin wrote:

Yep, looks like a typo introduced by 00ea64ed7a (doc/git-commit: add documentation for fixup=[amend|reword] options, 2021-03-15).

Want to try your hand at producing a patch? (It's OK if the answer is no; it just seems like a good opportunity for somebody to get their feet wet on contributing).

-Peff

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

I stumbled upon it while working on a synopsis parsing tool, similar to the Python docopt if familiar.

I can try, why not? Should I hang it up on this thread so to say. Is this a bug report?

On Mon, Jul 08, 2024 at 07:35:03PM +0000, Tomas Nordin wrote:

You can do it as a reply to this thread, or you can start a new thread. If there is a lot of discussion in the bug report thread, it is sometimes helpful to reference it in your commit message or cover letter. E.g. as:

  https://lore.kernel.org/git/87o7792xgu.fsf@posteo.net/

but in this case the issue is simple enough that you can just describe the problem fully in the commit message.

-Peff

Tomas Nordin <tomasn@posteo.net> writes:

This seems to have come from 00ea64ed (doc/git-commit: add documentation for fixup=[amend|reword] options, 2021-03-15), if "git blame" is to be trusted.

We can have --dry-run but we do not have to, we can have only one of

    "-c <commit>"
    "-C <commit>",
    "--squash <commit>",
    "--fixup amend:<commit>"
    "--fixup reword:<commit>", or
    "--fixup <commit>"

as they are mutually exclusive, but it is OK if we have none of them.

The last closing parenthesis after <commit> but before the closing square bracket is unwanted, I think, as you pointed out.

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

So then I make an attempt to provide a patch to remove that closing parenthesis. Please tell if it should be done differently somehow. The patch was done on top of maint.

From 5da052f43b119949c0ac0c7c3047542bc7474c17 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Tomas Nordin <tomasn@posteo.net>
Date: Sun, 21 Jul 2024 13:16:50 +0200
Subject: [PATCH] doc: remove dangling closing parenthesis

* Documentation/git-commit.txt:
  The second line of the synopsis, starting with [--dry-run] has a
  dangling closing paren in the second optional group. Probably added by
  misstake, so remove it.

Signed-off-by: Tomas Nordin <tomasn@posteo.net>
---
 Documentation/git-commit.txt | 2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

Tomas Nordin <tomasn@posteo.net> writes:

We do not "attach" patches to an e-mail, like this. Please visit https://lore.kernel.org/git/ and check patch messages from others.

An example:
  https://lore.kernel.org/git/e048ef54-5824-452d-ab1f-233581711f4e@web.de/

Your Subject: looks good. It shows that the author read (at least some parts of) Documentation/SubmittingPatches.

We do not work file-by-file. If any reader wants to know which paths were affected, they can see the diffstat before the patch.

I think what you wrote is just fine otherwise; just drop the "* Documentation/git-commit" line, dedent the body of the paragraph, and typofix the "misstake".

Thanks.

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

I tried to send the format-patch file using git send-email now. That will be in a thread other than this.

I made those amendments, lets see if its OK.