On Fri, Oct 25, 2019 at 06:08:57PM -0700, Jonathan Nieder wrote:

quoted

Users can discover commands and their brief usage by running 'git help
git' or 'git help -a'; both of these pages list all available commands
based on the contents of 'command-list.txt'. That means adding a new
command there is an important part of the new command process, and
therefore belongs in the new command tutorial.

Makes sense.

Not about this patch: is there a way to detect this automatically?
E.g. if a command in git.c::commands doesn't appear in
command-list.txt, could we make Git fail "make test"?

We almost detect this already:

  $ sed -i -e '/^git-bisect/d' command-list.txt 
  $ make check-docs
  make -C Documentation lint-docs
  make[1]: Entering directory '/home/szeder/src/git/Documentation'
      GEN cmd-list.made
      GEN doc.dep
  make[2]: Entering directory '/home/szeder/src/git'
  make[2]: 'GIT-VERSION-FILE' is up to date.
  make[2]: Leaving directory '/home/szeder/src/git'
  make[2]: Entering directory '/home/szeder/src/git'
  make[2]: 'GIT-VERSION-FILE' is up to date.
  make[2]: Leaving directory '/home/szeder/src/git'
      LINT lint-docs
  make[1]: Leaving directory '/home/szeder/src/git/Documentation'
  no link: git-bisect
  $ echo $?
  0

See that last "no link: git-bisect" line?  That's what happened to
catch my eyes when Derrick forgot to add his new 'sparse-checkout'
builtin to 'command-list.txt'.  I still haven't looked up what that
'no link' is supposed to mean, but if it were an error, then we would
have surely detected the missing entry in 'command-list.txt' in out CI
builds.

Another possibility would be to auto-generate that long list of
'cmd_foo()' function declaration in 'builtin.h' from
'command-list.txt', by adding a 'builtin' attribute to mark builtin
commands.