On Tue, Apr 21, 2015 at 6:16 AM, Charles Bailey [off-list ref] wrote:

On Mon, Apr 20, 2015 at 09:22:47PM +0530, karthik nayak wrote:

quoted

On 04/20/2015 02:49 PM, Charles Bailey wrote:

quoted

As far as I could tell - and please correct me if I've misunderstood,
cat-file's literally is about dealing with unrecognized types whereas
hash-object's --literally is about both creating objects with bad types
and invalid objects of "recognized" types. This latter scenario is where
the option name "literally" makes the most sense.

Yes. What you're saying is correct, but it also makes sense as we're asking
"cat-file" to give us information about the object irrespective of the type of the
object, hence asking it to literally print the information. Also it stays as a compliment
to "hash-object --literally", which is already existing.

OK, I think you've hit the main point which I was trying to make.

To me, "literally" means "without transformation" or "exactly as
written/recorded/transmitted" (which -t/-s do anyway) and doesn't really
encompass the "irrespective of type" meaning that it has been given here.

In any case, I've made my point so I won't labour it any further. I
think that --no-validation or --allow-any-type might be more accurate
but if everyone else is happy enough with --literally then I'm happy to
live with that too.

It's easy to be blinded into thinking that cat-file's new option
should be named --literally since it was inspired by the --literally
option of hash-object, but indeed it may not be the best choice.

In addition to your above suggestions (and --unchecked which you
proposed earlier), if we take inspiration from existing Git options,
perhaps one of the following (or something derived from them) would be
better?

    --force
    --ignore-errors
    --no-check
    --unsafe
    --no-strict
    --aggressive

Or, some pure made-up bike-shedding?

    --try-harder
    --allow-bogus-type
    --ignore-bogus-type
    --loose
    --gently