Re: What's cooking in git.git (Jan 2025, #05; Fri, 17)

David Aguilar [off-list ref] writes:

(The text below is from the original thread; sorry I don't have it handy
so I just replied here instead)

quoted

... but would it be simpler if we made it an extended boolean, i.e.

    true, yes, on, 1  -> same as "immediate"
    false, no, off, 0 -> same as "never"
    immediate         -> same as what we currently do
    never             -> same as what we currently do
    prompt            -> same as what we currently do
    number            -> same as what we currently do

I do think that, "0 -> same as never," makes a lot of sense from a
usability perspective.

I obviously do not agree.  "Suggest the right spelling and let the
user decide without time-bomb" is a very useful and safe UI, and the
above summary was done by mistake.

I would instead recommend that, "1 -> same as prompt," would be a safer
and less surprising behavior. If the user wants "immediate" they can be
explicit about it. "immediate" is the most dangerous of all of these
options so adding ambiguous routes to it seems like a step backwards.

Thanks for raising your concern.

As somebody who does *not* use the time-bomb UI that makes me wait
when the heuristics guessed correctly and forces me to scramble to
hit \C-c when it didn't, I am not qualified to comment in favor of
such a huge behaviour change, so I won't, and let others discuss.

I don't really think backwards-compatibility is much of a concern here
at all. It *would* be a concern if we were moving from a safe behavior
to a less-safe behavior (like this patch currently does) but not so in
the other direction like I'm proposing by making "1" mean "prompt".