Re: [WARNING] Proposed future changes that are backward incompatible

Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] wrote:

"George Spelvin" [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

There's one more change that was suggested that I'd like to propose:
- Make "git grep" search the whole repository by default; include an
  explicit "." path limiter to search only the current directory.

In addition to being more consistent with other commands like "git log",
this saves a lot of typing working in drivers/net/usb/ if the identifier
you're looking for is in include/.  Typing the additional space-dot
is pretty trivial if you want the current directory only.

I do not remember it was ever suggested, let alone coming to anything near
consensus.

The suggestion was in [ref], available as
http://marc.info/?l=git&m=123216049508531
but I agree that there was no consensus.  I just thought this thread was
a good place to elicit discussion, since it would be an incompatible change.

The only way you could justify such a default change is to say:

    Almost all the time, everybody wants to use this new behaviour; the
    old behaviour is almost never useful in any situation other than a
    narrow corner case; and if somebody wants to do such a useless thing
    in a corner case, he can always add " ." at the end, so nothing is
    lost.

I do not think that is true for the change you are proposing here.  'He
can always add " ." at the end' alone is not a good enough justification.

Please forgive me, I thought the above *might* be true, and wanted
to provoke discussion to see how people felt.  The "consistent with
git-log and all that stuff" argument is quite persuasive to me, but it's
a convenience feature, so it depends on how people feel.

I however think your use case deserves to be supported, and I would not
mind at all accepting a new "--full-tree" (or some shorter synonym) option
if the patch is cleanly done (hint, hint).

Hint taken.  Half of the patch is available at
http://marc.info/?l=git&m=123207990016944

Is -t/--full-tree okay?  I'd rather use -a/--all, but that's taken.  -t
isn't used by grep(1) either.

I'd rather not add this to "future changes that are backward incompatible"
list.  It may be a useful new feature, but that is not what the topic of
this thread is about.

Sorry for veering off on an inappropriate tangent.