Re: [PATCH 2/4] add -u: get rid of "treewideupdate" configuration

On Fri, Apr 08, 2011 at 03:22:20PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

So let's step back a bit.

How about we'd just add ':/' to make it equally easy to switch between
"local only" vs "tree-wide" in 1.7.6 release, and be done with it.  We
don't change the default for any of the commands at all.

Yeah, I am beginning to think that is a sensible route. And it commits
us to nothing, so if we decide much later that a change of default is
sensible, that is still open to us.

Since more than a year ago, I've been saying that the ideal is to make the
default not matter:

  http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/133570/focus=133683

If the default does not matter, why change it?  It just causes us more
headaches for dubious gain, no?

I'm not sure how much you can achieve the "make it not matter". The
shorthands go a long way, but I still want git to read my mind about
which I wanted to use (and the closest approximation of that, from my
experience, would be a per-repo variable). However, having the
shorthands mean that we can try them out in the real world and revisit
the topic in a year if people still care.

IIRC, I think the two reasons why we started discussing of "add -u" and
friends were that (1) some commands default to whole-tree while others
limit to $cwd --- inconsistency is bad; and (2) when the user wants to do
a full tree "add -u", there is no way other than counting the current
depth and typing "../" that many times.

But when we looked at the current set of commands that limit them to the $cwd,
we found that "add -u" was the only one that may make sense to switch the
default, meaning that the "consistency" was not something we would even
want to shoot for.  For example, we want our "git grep -e pattern" to
mimic "grep -r -e pattern .".

I am not sure of that. I thought there was interest in full-tree grep
(OK, _I_ had some interst in it).  But the same transition pain
arguments apply there, and we should be able to do "git grep pattern :/"
soon, right?

-Peff