Junio C Hamano writes: > Kyle Meyer <kyle@xxxxxxxxxx> writes: [...] >> fatal: ambiguous argument '3': unknown revision or path not in the >> working tree. [...] >> >> Disable Getopt's auto-abbreviation feature so that such options are >> properly relayed to format-patch. With this change, there is some >> risk of breaking external scripts that rely on the abbreviation, but >> that is hopefully unlikely given that Git does not advertise support >> for auto-abbreviation and most subcommands do not support it. > > I personally have no sympathy to those who drive "format-patch" from > inside "send-email". I'm not one of those users myself, but I was prompted to look into this by a report of the above error on another mailing list [*]. I do sympathize with "skip the explicit format-patch" users that find that error confusing. [*] https://yhetil.org/guix-patches/20221123190710.26517-1-paren@xxxxxxxxxxx > Many subcommands of "git" do take uniquely abbreviated double-dashed > option names, but it is true that we do not allow --vanything to be > given as -v even when there is no other double-dashed option that > begins with 'v', so "git send-email -v" that stands for "git > send-email --validate" indeed is an odd thing. Thanks for the correction. I didn't realize that many subcommands supported abbreviated options. I expected it to be, at most, the remaining ones written in Perl. When I tried out a couple of commands, I convinced myself that auto-abbreviation wasn't generally supported: $ git log --onelin fatal: unrecognized argument: --onelin $ git diff --histog error: invalid option: --histog But I didn't look hard enough. Trying again, I stumbled onto a few counterexamples (e.g., `git status --shor` works and so does `git range-diff --le ...`). And my claim in the commit message that "Git does not advertise support for auto-abbreviation" is wrong. I've now found this bit in gitcli(7): Abbreviating long options ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Commands that support the enhanced option parser accepts unique prefix of a long option as if it is fully spelled out, but use this with a caution. For example, `git commit --amen` behaves as if you typed `git commit --amend`, but that is true only until a later version of Git introduces another option that shares the same prefix, e.g. `git commit --amenity` option. > But robbing "git send-email --val" that expands to "--validate" from > the users is going a bit too far, I am afraid. Fair enough. For the reasons above, the last sentence I wrote in the commit message is invalid and can't justify the change. > The right solution for allowing "-v 3" given to "format-patch" I think > is to make send-email understand it and pass that through. The > presence of both ("validate" => \$validate) and ("v" => > \$reroll_count) in the GetOptions() argument would prevent "-v" to be > taken as "--validate" while still allowing "--val" to be used as an > abbrevatiion, no? I'd think that would work, yes. I'll look more into going this route. With that approach, there are other cases of abbreviation intercepting valid format patch options. For example, send-email doesn't have the short option -n while format-patch does, but that doesn't make it through to format-patch: $ git send-email --dry-run -n @{u} | grep Subj Subject: [PATCH] send-email: disable option auto-abbreviation $ git send-email --dry-run --numbered @{u} | grep Subj Subject: [PATCH 1/1] send-email: disable option auto-abbreviation > By the way, do we advertise support for any and all options to > format-patch when the feature to drive it from send-email is used? > Some of the options (e.g. "-o <directory>") do not make any sense in > the context I would suspect. Passing an -o to send-email would cause its format-patch call to fail because send-email uses -o internally: $ git send-email --dry-run -o . @{u} fatal: two output directories? format-patch -o /tmp/W1ZGCr0hwv -o @{u}: command returned error: 128 In any case, here's the only relevant part I spot from git-send-email(1): Patches can be specified as files, directories (which will send all files in the directory), or directly as a revision list. In the last case, any format accepted by linkgit:git-format-patch[1] can be passed to git send-email, as well as options understood by linkgit:git-format-patch[1]. So, there's no mention that some options like -o do not make sense in the send-email context, but perhaps that's obvious enough (at least in my view it's much more obvious than '-v 3' and -n not being valid). Thanks for the review.
