Sergey Organov <sorganov@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
> I wonder, why this intention of the author has not been opposed at that
> time is beyond my understanding, sorry! What exactly did it bring to
> make --no-patch a synonym for -s? Not only it's illogical, it's even not
> useful as being more lengthy.
Probably because we wanted to have a more descriptive synonym to
make it discoverable [*]. The release notes for v1.8.4 (where
"--no-patch" was added as a synonym for "-s") tells us this much.
* "git show -s" was less discoverable than it should have been. It
now has a natural synonym "git show --no-patch".
In hindsight, "--silent" or "--squelch" might also have been viable
choices, but if you really care, you have to ask Matthieu why
"--no-patch" was chosen. If I have to guess, it came from the
desire to phrase it as "--no-<something>", which some commands had
started to adopt as a convention to defeat "<something>" between
v1.7.0 and v1.8.4 (the latter is where "--no-patch" appeared), and
"--no-everything" is awkward to be used with "git show" as we still
want to see the commit message.
> Why somebody would use --no-patch instead of -s when she means -s?
Because "-s" does not have a longhand and not easily discoverable?
As I explained above, I thing that was the original motivation
behind wanting to have _some_ synonym.
[Footnote]
* In fact, I was surprised that somebody (I forgot who they were),
who I have known to be a user of git for 10+ years, wrote
"--no-patch" in an example in one of their recent messages,
outside the context of, and I strongly suspect that it happened
before, this "-s" vs "--no-patch" discussion. I took it to be
showing their preference of "--no-patch" over "-s", or their not
knowing about "-s" even they are a long-time Git user.
