Re: [Alt. PATCH] ls-remote: deprecate -h as short for --heads

Am 24.10.2017 um 02:52 schrieb Junio C Hamano:

René Scharfe [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

Am 21.10.2017 um 14:18 schrieb Junio C Hamano:

quoted

René Scharfe [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

FWIW, I use "-?" for that everywhere.  I have yet to find a command or
environment where it does something dangerous.

Yeah, it would have made the world a better place if we made that
choice back in 2008.  If we start a transition to make it so right
now, we might be able to make the world a better place by 2022,
perhaps.  I am not sure if the pain during the transition is worth
it, though.

"-?" works fine with builtins already -- they complain that the option
is unknown and then show the short help text.

Ah, I misunderstood what you meant, then.  I thought you were
advocating to move the built-in short-help support to know about and
explicitly react to "-?", and somehow forgot that it "works" more or
less already.

I don't mean to advocate here -- it's more like trying to get the
accounting right.  A little bit of OCD perhaps?

The fact that "-?" already works for most things is good, but the
transition pain still remains, as what's costly is to transition
people's expectation (i.e. "'-?' and not '-h' is the way to get
short help from any subcommand"), not the implementation to fill the
gaps for those that do not yet support '-?', I am afraid.

A minor cost for help-seeking users would be the extra error message at
the top of the short help text.

The main change would cause "git ls-remote -h" to show remote heads and
"git show-ref -h" to show HEAD.  Confused users would have to resort to
e.g. man, -help, --help, their search engine of choice, or -?.  I feel
this could be justified.  It would be different if e.g. reset started
to take -h as shorthand for --hard, as this would cause data loss.

The hard part would probably be allowing the execution of commands with
unknown arguments outside of repositories to show the help text, even
if they'd normally (with correct arguments) require one.  Converting
all commands from RUN_SETUP to RUN_SETUP_GENTLY seems painful.  Showing
help when a required repo is not found might be possible somehow.

With that I'm going to shut up, as I don't even use the affected
commands, nor can I imagine being in the place of someone impacted by
"git <something> -h" not showing a help text.

René