Re: [PATCH] branch -l: print useful info whilst rebasing a non-local branch

On Sat, Mar 24, 2018 at 9:33 PM, Jeff King [off-list ref] wrote:

IMHO we should do one of:

  1. Nothing. ;)

  2. Complain about "-l" in list mode to help educate users about the
     current craziness.

I think we should do this at a minimum. It's easy, and it doesn't
break any scripts who are doing something sane.

  3. Drop "-l" (probably with a deprecation period); it seems unlikely
     to me that anybody uses it for branch creation, and this would at
     least reduce the confusion (then it would just be "so why don't we
     have -l" instead of "why is -l not what I expect").

Personally, I'd prefer this, because it's minimal effort on scripts
part to fix themselves to use the long option name for reflog, and
doesn't cause that much heart burn.

  4. Repurpose "-l" as a shortcut for --list (also after a deprecation
     period). This is slightly more dangerous in that it may confuse
     people using multiple versions of Git that cross the deprecation
     line. But that's kind of what the deprecation period is for...

-Peff

I don't think this is particularly all that valuable, since we default
to list mode so it only helps if you want to pass an argument to the
list mode (since otherwise we'd create a branch). Maybe it could be
useful, but if we did it, I'd do it as a sort of double deprecation
period where we use one period to remove the -l functionality
entirely, before adding anything back. I think the *gain* of having -l
is not really worth it though.

Regards,
Jake