Thanks for all the feedback provided!
I'd like to summarise what consensus we have reached so far and
then propose a way forward:
* we'll use the term "ellipsis (pl. ellipses)" for what's
been referred to as "3dots", "n-dots", "many dots" and so
forth
* we would like to use ellipses when attached to SHA-1
values only for the purpose of specifying a symmetric
difference (as per gitrevisions(7))
* the usage of ellipses as a "here we truncated something
longer" is a relic which should be phased out
To get there, preventing describe_detached_head from appending
an ellipsis to the SHA-1 values it prints is one important step.
This change does not cause any test to fall over.
The other important step is dealing with the "git diff --raw"
output which features ellipses in the relic-fashion no longer
desired.
It would appear that simplifying diff.c's diff_aligned_abbrev
routine to something like:
/* Do we want all 40 hex characters?
*/
if (len == GIT_SHA1_HEXSZ)
return oid_to_hex(oid);
/* An abbreviated value is fine.
*/
return diff_abbrev_oid(oid, len);
does do the trick.
This change causes quite a few tests to fall over; however, they
all have truncated-something-longer-ellipses in their
raw-diff-output expected sections, and removing the ellipses
from there makes the tests pass again, :-)
If we can agree that this is a way forward, i'll create & send
v2 of the patch series to the mailing list (it'll include the
fixed tests) and we'll see where we go from there.
