Thanks for Cc-ing me, and sorry for not being very responsive these days :-\. Jeff King writes: > On Fri, Mar 23, 2018 at 10:40:34PM +0000, Aaron Greenberg wrote: > >> I can appreciate Matthieu's points on the use of "-" in destructive >> commands. As of this writing, git-merge supports the "-" shorthand, >> which while not destructive, is at least _mutative_. Also, >> "git branch -d" is not destructive in the same way that "rm -rf" is >> destructive since you can recover the branch using the reflog. > > There's a slight subtlety there with the reflog, because "branch -d" > actually _does_ delete the reflog for the branch. By definition if > you've found the branch with "-" then it was just checked out, so you at > least have the old tip. But the branch's whole reflog is gone for good. > > That said, I'd still be OK with it. I don't have objection either. Anyway, we're supporting this "-" shortcut in more and more commands (partly because it's a nice microproject, but it probably makes sense), so the "consistency" argument becomes more and more important, and is probably more important than the (relative) safety of not having the shortcut. >> One thing to consider is that approval of this patch extends the >> implementation of the "-" shorthand in a piecemeal, rather than >> consistent, way (implementing it in a consistent way was the goal of >> the patch set you mentioned in your previous email.) Is that okay? Or >> is it better to pick up the consistent approach where it was left? > > I don't have a real opinion on whether it should be implemented > everywhere or not. But IMHO it's OK to do it piecemeal for now either > way, unless we're really sure it's time to move to respecting it > everywhere. Because we can always convert a > piecemeal-but-covers-everything state to centralized parsing as a > cleanup. Not sure whether it's already been mentionned here, but a previous attempt is here: https://public-inbox.org/git/1488007487-12965-1-git-send-email-kannan.siddharth12@xxxxxxxxx/ My understanding is that the actual code is quite straightforward, but 1) it needs a few cleanup patches to be done correctly, and 2) there are corner-cases to deal with like avoiding a commit message like "merge branch '-' into 'foo'". Regarding 2), any piecemeal implementation with proper tests is a step in the right direction. -- Matthieu Moy https://matthieu-moy.fr/
