Re: parse-options does not recognize "unspecified" behavior

Quoting Pranit Bauva [off-list ref]:

On Sat, Mar 19, 2016 at 4:55 PM, SZEDER Gábor [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

quoted

Yes, I think in general, "-v" and "-q" should work as opposites. But
that is not the case with commit, where "-v" and "-q" operate on totally
separate messages. I think that is a UX mistake, and we would not do
it that way if designing from scratch. But we're stuck with it for
historical reasons (I'd probably name "--verbose" as "--show-diff" or
something if writing it today).

Yeah, as a long-time 'git commit -v' user I never really thought about
the name of the option, but when I pointed out the multiple verbose
levels it struck me as a rather unfortunate name for this feature,
too.  Oh, well, we are stuck with it indeed.

However, that doesn't mean that we have to spread this badly chosen
name from options to config variables, does it?  I think that if we
are going to define a new config variable today, then it should be
named properly, and it's better not to call it 'commit.verbose', but
'commit.showDiff' or something.  Perhaps we could even define two new
config variables: 'commit.showDiff' for the diff of the changes to be
committed (= '-v'), and 'commit.showUnstagedDiff' for the - wait for
it! - unstaged changes (= '-v -v').  Not sure about the variable
names, though, because "plain" 'git diff' shows unstaged changes,
while 'git diff --cached' shows staged changes.

This seems a better way to go about.

quoted

Furthermore, it doesn't mean that we can't add properly named command
line option(s) and state that '-v|--verbose' is a synonym to
'--show-diff' (maybe even deprecate '--verbose'), but I don't want to
squeeze even more into a GSOC micro project.

Its perfectly fine. It hardly a half an hour job. Though I like the
idea that we should use both "-v|--verbose" and "--show-diff" instead
of deprecating it.

Deprecating doesn't mean "removing".  It merely means that we add a note
to the documentation stating that the option in question is deprecated,
but we will keep supporting it for several years and releases to come.

This means that '--verbose' and '--show-diff' must coexist for quite a
while, and 'git commit' should do the right thing even if both old and
new options are combined.  And, of course, in combination with the new
config variable(s).  I suspect that all this would be more than a half
an hour job.