Re: [PATCH] Change 'Deltifying objects' to 'Delta compressing objects'

Nicolas Pitre [off-list ref] wrote:

Frankly, I think effort should be spent on the refs update display at 
this point.  Something that looks like:

* refs/heads/origin: fast forward to branch 'master' of git://gi
t.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6
  old..new: 66ffb04..4fa4d23

[ note that I arbitrarily cut the long line before the 80th column to 
  show the effect within an email ]

You usually get long lines that gets wrapped, so that means 3 lines of 
screen space for one updated branches.  Is the "66ffb04..4fa4d23" 
information really useful?  Might someone ever care?

The reason its formatted the way it is today is someone can grab
that line into a copy-paste buffer and throw it onto a "git-log"
or "gitk" command line with ease to see what new stuff has come in.

Me, I just use the reflog if I care (`origin@{1}..origin`) to see
what a fetch changed in the tracking branch.

However I *don't* need the remote branch name or the remote URL,
especially if we are storing it into a tracking branch.  That's most
likely coming from a configured remote that the user fetches from
frequently.  I don't think about Linus' URL, I think about the fact
that in my linux-2.6 repository his directory is my origin remote.

Maybe something like this would be more useful:

 * origin: fast-forwarded: 66ffb04..4fa4d23

Or if you are using refs/remotes style tracking branches:

 * origin/master: fast-forwarded: 66ffb04..4fa4d23
 * origin/pu: forcing update: 66ffb04..4fa4d23

Too terse?  Yea, probably.  But it is a whole lot shorter.


My other pet peeve here is the display from send-pack and
receive-pack when you push a ref.  Hello?

  updating 'refs/heads/master'
    from de61e42b539ffbd28d2a2ba827bb0eb79767057b
    to   d7e56dbc4f60f6bd238e8612783541d89f006fb7
  ...
  refs/heads/master: de61e42b539ffbd28d2a2ba827bb0eb79767057b -> d7e56dbc4f60f6bd238e8612783541d89f006fb7

That's like 4 too many SHA-1 strings for the average user.

-- 
Shawn.