Re: [PATCH/RFC/GSoC 0/2] add a add.patch config variable

Dominik Fischer [off-list ref] writes:

I strove to create an add.patch configuration option that did the same
as always passing the parameter --patch to git-add. Junio C Hamano
then made me aware that when set, this option would influence and
possibly destroy other commands that internally use git-add. So I
implemented the recursion counter, which is now the first of the two
commits.

This does not solve the problem of scripting. People write scripts, and
write git commands in these scripts. "git add" is a very good candidate
to appear in scripts, indeed.

You can't break people's scripts without a very solid transition plan.
And most of the time, safe transition plans are also painful for
everyone (remember the push.default change? I'm happy it's done, but
that wasn't a lightweight change ...).

In this case, it's quite clear to me that any transition plan would be
far more painful than the possible benefits. Without breaking backward
compatibility, I can already set "alias.p = add --patch" and use "git p"
instead of "git add --patch". Even better: that's 2 less keystrokes.

A config variable to set an option by default is good when the user
wants to set it and forget about it. In this case, you clearly can't
"forget about it", as running "git add" and "git add -p" correspond to
really different use-cases.

-- 
Matthieu Moy
http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~moy/