Junio C Hamano <[email protected]> writes:
> Thomas Rast <[email protected]> writes:
>
>> Junio C Hamano <[email protected]> writes:
>>
>>> I agree that this patch may reduce confusion locally, but if we were
>>> to go in this direction, we should be consistent and enforce "stuck"
>>> form everywhere,
>>
>> Hmm. Do you want to go there?
>
> Absolutely not ;-)
>
> But that unpleasant place would be the logical conclusion where this
> patch leads us to, I would have to say. I was hoping that there is
> an alternative solution to avoid that.
>
> For example, gitk's parseviewargs is very well aware of the options
> it supports, and it goes through the argument list one by one,
> acting on what option it is looking at. Couldn't it be extended to
> handle options with stuck and unstuck form? After all, it has to
> know that "-L" and "-S" are supported options; it wouldn't be too
> much to ask for the parser to also know that "-L" eats the next
> token (i.e. pass the pair <"-L", next token> intact as two separate
> args to the underlying "log") while it can pass "-L?*" as is, no?
It's not quite that easy because gitk does two-stage processing, and the
big switch you are discussing here is only the second one. The first
one is git-rev-parse, and while it happens to know about '-n 1', it does
not recognize any other unstuck option arguments. (I haven't stared too
long, but I think git-rev-parse is important to distinguish revisions
from paths.)
I actually burned some train time today looking into this, and the
situation is much worse than I thought. There is absolutely no
consistency in any dimension:
a) many commands use parse_options internally, where mandatory args can
be stuck or unstuck, but optional args must be stuck
a1) git branch --{contains,merged,no-merged} take a mandatory arg,
except if they are last on the command line, in which case the
option reverts to the default (HEAD). Effectively this means the
argument is half-optional but the spelling seen in the wild is
usually unstuck.
a2) git-rev-parse (at least) still handrolls its parsing, so no
--default=HEAD
a3) git-commit-tree does not understand any of its short options in
stuck form (!)
b) the perl scripts mostly seem to be using Getopt::Long which handles
things similarly, though I can't quote chapter&verse
b1) just to prove a point: git-add--interactive. I'm sure there's a
user-facing exception somewhere too...
c) shell scripts mostly go through git-sh-setup, using parseopt
internally
c1) git-filter-branch
d) gitk doesn't do *un*stuck as explained above
On top of that, documentation is a wild mash of styles, sometimes even
in the same manpage. For example, git-describe(1) tells the poor user
about --candidates=<n> and four paragraphs further down about --match
<pattern>.
So my short-term plan just became: document instead of fix; clean up
manpages towards the stuck form for long options; have gitk only parse
-Lstuck.
Medium term we can move gitk to a different option parser, resolving at
least that inconsistency.
Longer term we can see about moving some more of the remaining craziness
towards parseopt, getting consistency for free.
--
Thomas Rast
[email protected]
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