Re: [PATCH] docs: add description of status output table

On 2021-01-10 at 01:41:23, Junio C Hamano wrote:

"brian m. carlson" [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

The table describing the porcelain format in git-status(1) is helpful,
but it's not completely clear what the three sections mean, even to
some contributors.  As a result, users are unable to find how to detect
common cases like merge conflicts programmatically.

I agree that the addition clarifies, but it is a bit sad that we
already have a beginning of the explanation; I wonder if we should
improve the existing description in addition, even if it may not be
sufficient to eliminate the need for this new paragraph.  Here is
what we already have:

    For paths with merge conflicts, `X` and `Y` show the modification
    states of each side of the merge. For paths that do not have merge
    conflicts, `X` shows the status of the index, and `Y` shows the status
    of the work tree.  For untracked paths, `XY` are `??`.  Other status
    codes can be interpreted as follows:

This introductory text does sort-of hint that there are three
classes (merged paths, unmerged paths and untracked paths), but (1)
the order the three classes are described do not match that of the
table, and (2) the explanation of the untracked paths predates the
addition of ignored ones to the untracked class, so the description
is added after the legends as if an afterthought.

I am actually tempted to suggest rewriting the whole section,
starting from the paragraph above and ending at the table, with
something like this:

Sure, I can reroll with that.  I noticed that we're using a text diagram
instead of a table, so maybe I can fix that up as well in v2, depending
how the output looks.
-- 
brian m. carlson (he/him or they/them)
Houston, Texas, US