Re: [PATCH] Add commands that git-gc runs underneath

Andreas Ericsson [off-list ref] writes:

Junio C Hamano wrote:

quoted

Andreas Ericsson [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

When gc was a shell-script, it was fairly easy to find out the command-
sequence...

Maybe referring more advanced/curious users to contrib/examples/
directory is a good idea, but not necessarily from manpages of
the commands that have been rewritten in C.

I think contrib/examples/ needs a README file that effectively
say "these are the last versions of shell script implementation
of the commands before they were rewritten in C.  New features
may have been added to the built-in ones but these example
scripts are not kept up to date.  They are here to serve as
examples to show you how you would pipeline the plumbing level
commands."

Sensible, and also avoids the possible bitrot problem with the
man-page should there be additional actions added to standard
git-gc operations.

Let's just make all manual pages empty, and then we have solved all
manual page bitrot problems in one fell swoop.

Really: I don't see how this helps at all.  If I am interested in
seeing what operations git-gc performs, I am not interested in some
historical script's behavior.

Hiding that information into contrib/examples and telling people that
it may be wrong, anyway, is not really helpful as a way of documenting
git-gc's behavior.

Of _course_, _any_ useful documentation will have a "possible bitrot
problem with the man-page" whenever code is changed.  The solution is
not to make the manual pages as useless as possible so that nothing
can be subject to bitrot.  The solution is to update the information.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum