Re: [PATCH v3] add --abbrev to 'git cherry'

Stephen Boyd [off-list ref] writes:

You might want to look at using the parse options API. It has options
for verbose and abbrev builtin, so you don't have to do any extra
work....

Why do people even think a change like this to a _plumbing_ command is
desirable?

Admittedly, there already is "verbose" option that adds redundant
information to the output of this particular plumbing, which might
arguably be equally wrong as what this patch does, but I think it is
excusable.  At least it lets the Porcelain script that uses the command
avoid calling 'git cat-file commit' to find out the title of the commit.

But --abbrev does not even add any information.  If implemented correctly
(which earlier iteration did not even do), it may not lose information by
choping the output too short to make it ambiguous, but as others pointed
out about using grep in the calling Porcelain to filter (or more likely,
sift the lines into "+" and "-" bins) to shoot down -d/-D options, I do
not see the point of adding --abbrev to this plumbing command very much.