On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 1:06 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Samuel Bronson <naesten@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > >> Hmm, yes, I had noticed that it was a tristate (merge.ff clearly is), >> and I guess --no-ff-only is a pretty ugly flag. I do have to ask, >> though: why give --ff these new values? Wouldn't it make more sense to >> reuse the values accepted by merge.ff; namely, 'true' (the implied >> default), 'false', and 'only'? > > The 'true' and 'false' values to merge.ff are carry-over from the days > when it was a boolean, _not_ a tristate. If we were to make the UI more > rational by making it clear that this is not a boolean, it is a good time > for us to aim a bit higher than merely repeating the mistakes we made in > the past due to historical accident. In other words, we could add a > synonym for the "default" mode in addition to "--ff=true" (and for the > "always merge" mode in addition to "--ff=false") that makes it clear that > the value is _not_ a boolean [*1*]. If we were to go the "--ff=<value>" > route, we have to add support for other ways to spell boolean 'true' > (e.g. 'yes', '1', and 'on') anyway, so it is not that much extra work to > do so, I would think. Sure, that makes sense. I was just a little worried that you might be (accidentally) proposing that --ff use a different set of names than merge.ff for a moment there... >> Otherwise, this looks like a very nice way to implement what I want: I >> guess it is probably a mistake that the existing (documented) flags do >> not behave in this way? > > Yeah, right now if you say "merge --ff-only --no-ff", we say these are > mutually exclusive (which is true), but if you think about the tristate > nature of the 'ff' option and spell it differently in your head, i.e. > "merge --ff=only --ff=never", it is reasonable to argue that we should > apply the usual "last one overrides" rule and behave as if "merge --no-ff" > were given (for the purpose of "last one overrides", the configured > defaults can be treated as if they come very early on the command line). > After all "merge --no-ff --ff" does seem to use the "last one overrides" > rule. Yes, I totally agree that it would make more sense that way; I certainly tried that before I even began to look at any of the code. > [Footnote] > > *1* Perhaps 'allowed' instead of 'normal' (which I wrote out of thin-air; > I do not have any strong preference on the actual values) may be a better > choice for such a "this is not a boolean" spelling for the default mode. -- 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