Re: [PATCH] Documentation: add a planning document for the next CLI revamp

Theodore Tso wrote:

On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 08:48:05PM -0700, Sam Vilain wrote:

quoted

From: Sam Vilain <redacted>

For cross-command CLI changes to be effective, they need to be
cohesively planned.  Add a planning document for this next set of
changes.

Here are my favorites:

* Add the command "git revert-file <files>" which is syntactic sugar for:

        git checkout HEAD -- <files>

  Rationale: Many other SCM's have a way of undoing local edits to a
  file very simply, i.e."hg revert <file>" or "svn revert <file>", and
  for many developers's workflow, it's useful to be able to undo local
  edits to a single file, but not to everything else in the working
  directory.  And "git checkout HEAD -- <file>" is rather cumbersome
  to type, and many beginning users don't find it intuitive to look in
  the "git-checkout" man page for instructions on how to revert a
  local file.

I like it, although I guess one would have to add a "--staged" flag to
git revert-file to be able to checkout files from index as well, or people
will wonder why that can't be done.

* Change the argument handling for "git format-patch" so it is
  consistent with everything else which takes a set of commits.  Yes,
  it means that where people have gotten used to typing "git
  format-patch origin", they'll have to type instead: "git
  format-patch origin..", but's much more consistent.  We've done the
  best we can by documenting the existing behavior, but if'we re going
  to make major, potentially incompatible, CLI changes, this is
  something to at least consider.  Maybe with a config file for people
  who really don't want to retrain their fingers to type the two extra
  periods?

"git format-patch" does exactly the same thing as other commit-range handling
commands do, which is assume that the missing commit end-point is HEAD, so it
actually is consistent, although it doesn't quite look as if it is.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson@op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
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