Re: [PATCH] make color.ui default to 'auto'

Matthieu Moy [off-list ref] writes:

Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

I think you are missing the entire point, which is not "is anyone
harmed?"

Again, it is. If the new default is really harmful for too many people,
then documentations will have to mention how to fix it.

And really, I do not forsee any newbie-oriented starting with "here's
how to disable colors in case you need it", because of the reasons
mentionned in the message.

quoted

Our recommendation has been "use color=auto"

Not really. Neither Documentation/gittutorial.txt nor
Documentation/user-manual.txt mention colors. Pro Git mentions it, but
more as a possibility than as a recommandation. This is the
recommandation of the rest of the world, not "ours".

Do you mean the git users who learn and use Git without being in the
circle of people who updates Documentation/ hierarchy "the rest of
the world"?

I think that is a flawed mentality.  They are part of "us".

It's not "either we update the docs or we update the code", it's "follow
what the rest of the world is doing", and "rest of the world" has to
imply a notion of majority (not all tutorials talk about color.ui).

Yes, exactly.

Read the statement you made again, with the assumption that
everybody ("the rest of the world") already knows (and/or agreed to)
colouring is a good thing.

... Other beginners do not know about
color.ui=auto, and may not discover it by themselves, hence live with
black&white outputs while they may have prefered colors.

A few people (e.g. color-blind) prefer having no colors, but they can
easily set color.ui=never for this (and googling "disable colors in git"
already tells them how to do so).

Now, realize that after switching the default, these "few people"
have to live with distracting (or unreadable) output.  Because these
people are minority, their websearch "disable colors in git" will by
definition have smaller number of hits than "enable colors in git"
the above claims people "may not discover it by themselves".  In a
way, you are making things even harder because these minority do not
have many similar others to ask help for.

That is the honest way to express what you said in the second
paragraph.

If we really want to justify the changing of the default, we should
not try to weasel out by using asymmetric wording from the fact that
we are making things less convenient for one kind of people.  We
should be honest and say what we are doing: "it will make things
easier for majority while making it less convenient for minority".

I am however saying that in this case, we are better off not even
trying to come up with such a lame excuse for us to hurt color-blind
people in order to make things easier for majority.  Just saying
"the rest of the world prefer automatic color and that is what we
recommend, so make the code match" should be sufficient.