On Mon, Aug 01 2022, Victoria Dye via GitGitGadget wrote:
> [...] I didn't see a major UX benefit of 'git diagnose' vs 'git
> bugreport --diagnose', so I went with the latter, simpler approach.
I really wanted to like this, but I find the end result here really
confusing from a UX perspective.
You can now run "git bugreport --diagnose", which creates a giant *.zip
file to go along with your *.txt, but your *.txt makes no reference to
it.
Should you ... attach it to your bug report to this mailing list, do
something else?
The documentation doesn't offer much in the way of hints, other than
suggesting (with --no-report) that this --diagnose is for something
entirely different (and that's how "scalar" uses it).
I know what it's really for after reading this series, but for "git
bugreport" in particular we should be really careful about not making
the UX confusing.
The generated *.zip contains some really deep info about your repo (and
not just metadata, e.g. copies of the index, various logs etc.), someone
e.g. in a proprietary setting really doesn't want to be sharing that
info.
So I would like to see real integration into "git bugreport", i.e. for
us to smartly report more repository metrics, e.g. approx number of
loose objects, the sort of state "__git_ps1" might report, etc.
But I think the end-state here makes things much more confusing for
users.
> An alternative implementation considered was creating a new 'git diagnose'
> builtin, but the new command would end up duplicating much of
> 'builtin/bugreport.c'.
It seems we always "return" from cmd_bugreport() quite quickly, and we
basically only share the code to create the output directory. Just
duplicating or sharing that seems like a much better approach for now
than creating the above UX confusion.
Note that you can also share code between multiple built-ins, even in
the same file (see e.g. builtin/{checkout,log}.c). So we could even
share something like the safe_create_leading_directories() calling code
in bugreport.c without libifying it.
> Finally, despite 'scalar diagnose' now being nothing more than a wrapper for
> 'git bugreport --diagnose', it is not being deprecated in this series.
> Although deprecation -> removal could be a future cleanup effort, 'scalar
> diagnose' is kept around for now as an alias for users already accustomed to
> using it in 'scalar'.
We don't have a "make install" to get a "scalar" onto user's systems
yet, do we really need to worry about those users?
Or is this a reference to the out-of-tree version of "scalar", not
git.git's?
