Martin Waitz <tali@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > I thought doing the same for these commands as for --help and --version > but wanted to hear some opinions first... > > After all, the comment in front of --version talked about legacy, > so I was afraid to add more legacy ;-) Nothing to fear; legacy is about "version" vs "--version". By the way, rev-parse is not about "refs" at all. It is about "revs". A possibly useless comment for people unfamiliar with history I should add is that git-rev-parse serves two completely different purposes. One is to separate command line parameters into four category and output only specified kind. Four categories come from flags vs non-flags and arguments related to revision traversal vs other arguments. The "parse" in rev-parse actually stands for this feature. Many git Porcelainish were implemented as shell scripts that pipes rev-list output into diff-tree, and rev-parse was originally invented as a helper for them. We made many "rev-list | diff-tree --stdin" pattern into built-in commands, by introducing revision.c, so this first feature of rev-parse has become less useful. But as a side-feature, when showing "non-flag, revision traversal argument", it is told how to show the object name, and also it acquired --verify option to make sure "extended sha1 expression" (refname, refname followed by ^n, ~n etc.) are valid. These days, the command is used primarily to get the object name from an extended sha1 expression. But some commands (most notably, bisect) still rely on the "parse" aspect of the command. However, in its history it has also become a kitchen sink command. I think it may make sense to move these kitchen-sink features such as --show-cdup etc. out of it and give it the direct options to git wrapper these days. When these features were added, git wrapper did not even exist. - 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