Re: A tour of git: the basics (and notes on some unfriendly messages)

Steffen Prohaska [off-list ref] writes:

Quite often git prints a lot of very technical information that
is not very interesting as long as things succeed without error.
Some examples are
- git fetch (see above)

Probably.

- git rebase: prints a lot of details that I'm not interested in
  unless the rebase fails.

Yes.  Most of the clutter is coming from "am" which also should
be squelched.

Saying

	Switched to branch <blah>

is good when the branch to rebase is specified.

	"HEAD is now at ..."
is not useful -- it is a side effect of rewinding the head to
the --onto commit.

	<blank line>
        Applying <patch subject>
	<blank line>
        Wrote tree <tree object>
        Committed: <commit object>

are coming from "am" for each patch.  We could squelch these
into just one "Applying <patch subject>" and nothing else, which
would also help making "am" quieter.

- git push: prints updates of remote heads. A message about
  failing to update a remote head may get lost.

Please do not remove the report of successful update, as people
often say "git push" or "git push $there" without explicitly
saying which refs to push.  When pushing out to publish, I say
"git push ko" (to mean k.org) and I _want_ my positive feedback.

- git merge: the fact that a merge is a fast forward merge gets
  printed at the very top, followed by (often a lot of) diffstat.
  I know diffstat can help to judge if the merge did what you
  expected. But even more important is the fact that the merge
  was just a fast forward, which may get buried under lots of output.

I do not think fast-forwardness is particularly interesting.  If
you find fast-forwardness interesting, I suspect you would even
want to know what _your_ change that were not in the other side
of the merge, which is something that we do not even report
right now.

Maybe git should become more quiet, as other unix tools are, and
per default only report problems. Technical details and progress
could be requested explicitly by '--verbose' or similar.

I'd agree with this sentiment in principle, and many of the
things you propose to remove above fall into the "unnecessary
clutter" category.  But some of the existing output fall into
the "necessary info" category --- diffstart after merge and
report of successful remote ref updates are such things, so we
should be careful not to go overboard.