Re: What's cooking in git.git (Feb 2013, #05; Tue, 12)

Andrew Ardill [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

If that is the change we are going to make, and if you can guarantee
that nobody who is used to the historical behaviour will complain,
then I am fine with it, but I think the latter part of the condition
will not hold.

Does the impossibility of asserting that no-one will complain put this
in the 'too hard' bucket?

Basically, yes.  "Cannot be done without UI regression."

It could be a Git 2.0 item, if you plan the transition right, though.

The implication here is that a relatively small number of people will
be inconvenienced by needing to specify extra flags/set up an alias.
Compare this to the many for whom the expected behaviour is now
default, and we have a net win.

We take backward compatibility a lot more seriously; it is not even
a democracy.

"Net win" does not mean an iota.  Even if "small number" is 47 and
large majority is 4 million, it does not change the fact that you
are breaking things these 47 people have depended on working in an
expected (the "expected" does not have to be "intuitive" in this
sentence; what counts more is that it is the way they are accustomed
to) way and introducing a UI regression.