Re: Command-line interface thoughts

On Fri, 10 Jul 2011, Michael Nahas wrote:

Jakub Narebski wrote:

quoted

'git diff' / 'git diff --cached' / 'git diff HEAD' is about use cases
(or "user stories").  'git diff NEXT WTREE' / 'git diff HEAD NEXT' /
/ 'git diff HEAD WTREE' are about mechanism.

Would you say that the UNIX commands "find", "grep", and "xargs" are
about use cases?  I rarely use them by themselves.  They clearly
manipulate concepts: files and lines.  So, it's easy for me to think
what this does:

find . | grep "\.h" | xargs grep MyClass | grep public

You do know that this is way suboptimal, even if you don't have 'ack'
installed, and don't use "git grep --no-index"?

I'm trying to find concepts the concepts that git manipulates and I
think NEXT and WTREE are part of those concepts.

It is my opinion that if we focus on concepts, we'll be able to create
general commands and that the user will be able to combine the
commands in new and interesting ways, like I combined the UNIX
commands above.

I believe in "common" use cases.  The common case should be fast.  I
have always recommended still allowing "git diff" by itself.


BUT if we focus only on use cases, we'll create tools that are
specific to ONE thing and are NOT general.  They will be harder for
users to conceptualize and harder to combine in new and interesting
ways.

But if it is the angle you want to play, then don't advertise it as
a feature meant for _new users_!  But if you go that route (e.g. as a way
to compare BASE with THEIRS, for whatever reason), then you probably
would need to invent some notation that is obvious that these are not
refs, like HEAD, ORIG_HEAD, MERGE_HEAD and FETCH_HEAD are.  Something
that is easy to remember, won't go in the way of either git or shell;
see e.g.

  http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/175262/focus=175407

in "[RFC/PATCH] git put: an alternative to add/reset/checkout" thread.

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland