Re: [PATCH v3 2/3] git-push: clean up some of the output from git push --porcelain

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

... Which means that the original porcelain
format was perhaps not very well thought-out.
...
now whether to fix it and break compatibility, or leave it broken...

I think the purpose of the patches that started this thread was to admit
that 1965ff7 (add --porcelain option to git-push, 2009-06-22) was not well
thought out, and to break compatibility to fix it.

Having said that, I would say that what 1965ff7 specified was only these
two:

    = TAB refs/heads/master:refs/heads/master TAB [up to date]
    - TAB :refs/heads/foobar TAB [deleted]

so everything else that do not match this pattern is a fair game, most
importantly, the line that begins with "To" would not be mistaken with
this pattern, I think.

quoted

@@ -1071,7 +1071,8 @@ int transport_push(struct transport *transport,
 		}
 
 		if (!quiet && !ret && !refs_pushed(remote_refs))
-			fprintf(stderr, "Everything up-to-date\n");
+			fprintf(porcelain ? stdout : stderr,
+				"Everything up-to-date\n");
 		return ret;
 	}

This one, on the other hand, seems to me to be just noise. What does a
--porcelain caller learn by seeing "Everything up-to-date" that it did
not already know from seeing the list of refs?

I do not care too much about this hunk either way.  We could leave it as
is, as we will be giving some other stuff to the standard error stream
without squelching anyway, even with the three-patch series.  We could
squelch only this message, but it is dubious what it is buying us.  If you
forced me to decide, I would probably say "let's just drop this hunk and
keep the code as-is".

As to the exit status, do you have any thoughts, by the way?

I am not convinced that it would be necessary nor even a good idea to make
it behave inconsistently between the normal case and Porcelain case, only
to make it easier to special case the "remote side would reject due to
non-fast-forward" failure mode (iow, even if the calling script knows that
it would fail due to non-fast-forward but otherwise everything else would
be fine, what good would it do?)