On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 04:00:11PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote: > Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> writes: > > > I think every caller should be using "-m" these days. I know we can't > > _require_ it for historical reasons. But shouldn't symbolic-ref always > > write a reflog entry? Even something like "we changed and I can't tell > > you why" to cover older scripts that call symbolic-ref? > > I think the particular instance Csaba saw in rebase may want to pass the > reason why it flipped the HEAD. Oh, definitely. I was thinking more for external scripts that we can't fix. > Flipping HEAD temporarily to another ref to do something, only to flip it > back before giving the control back to the user, might be something a > script may want to have a choice of not logging, so I am mildly negative > on changing the command to unconditionally log empty entry without being > told. Yeah, that is a legitimate use case. But I suspect many scripts were simply never updated after reflogs were introduced (or their authors) were lazy, so they flip it once without a reflog, and then the next well-behaved writer who comes along ends up writing a reflog entry that shows a hole. So it is a question of whether helping probably-broken users is worth shutting off a legitimate use case. I also wonder how valuable that use case is. As a user, I think I'd rather see _everything_ in the reflog, even if the script-writer doesn't think it's important. I don't know that it matters much in any case. We haven't had any bug reports either way; and given the current behavior, one can always yell at the script author to properly reflog. > "update-ref" seems to write an empty entry even when not given an "-m" > option, and we can view it as robbing a similar choice from the scripts. > We might want to fix it. I dunno. I'm inclined to wait until somebody actually wants it. In the meantime it helps users of old and/or broken scripts by providing an additional checkpoint of state that might otherwise be missing. -Peff -- 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