On Thu, 2009-09-17 at 20:01 +1000, Rob Barrett wrote: > When starting with git people almost always ask some variant of "how > do I know whether this option should be prefixed with dashes or not?" > i.e. git reset --hard vs. git stash save --patch, which coupled with > other path, sha and treeish args make things a bit more confusing. > > Not sure if this has been discussed before? If it has point me at the > discussion and I'll go look at it -- no need to read further. > > And people stop asking the question after they get used to git - but > that's not the same as being usable. > > Out of 60+ commands, most take the form > git <subcommand> [--option] > and a few take the form > git <subcommand> subsubcommand [--option] > > (a quick scan gives: bisect,bundle,reflog,remote,stash) > > My questions: > 1. What is the distinction that makes the 10% special enough to get > non-prefixed options? > 2. Is it worthwhile? Wouldn't it be better if to shoot for more > consistency / less complexity? I don't think anybody is going to say that it all makes perfect sense. One pattern is: git <verb> vs. git <subsystem> <verb> (gui, svn, ...) git <noun> <verb> (bundle, remote, stash, submodule, ...) Another pattern is that options don't change the verb, they just modify it. But it's easy to find exceptions: git tag -l git branch --contains <commit> git am --abort I personally think it would help consistency to use the subsubcommand pattern more and treat 'git tag <tag>' as an shorthand. If you really want to to create a tag called 'list', you'd need to use 'git tag tag list', or maybe 'git tag -- list'. Even with compat support for options and a general agreement that I doubt exists, that's at best a 95% compatible change, so it's unlikely to happen soon. - Owen -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html