Hi Patrick
On 24/04/2024 07:48, Patrick Steinhardt wrote:
On Tue, Apr 23, 2024 at 11:28:03PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
Do not close that communication channel on us.
While I agree that it might not be a good idea to set it for our users,
the usecase mentioned by this patch series is scripting. And here I very
much agree with the sentiment that it makes sense to give an easy knob
to disable all advice (disclosure: James is part of the Gitaly team at
GitLab, and that is where this feature comes from, so I am very much
biased).
Maybe an environment variable would be a better fit for turning advice
off in scripts?
It has happened multiple times to us that new advices were introduced
that then subsequently caused regressions in Gitaly because the output
of Git commands now looks different. While addressing such breakage is
easy enough to do, it does add up if we have to run Git with every
single advice that we may hit turned off individually.
I'm sure you've considered these suggestions but (a) would it be
possible for Gitaly to filter out lines beginning with "hint: " when it
captures the output of commands and (b) would it be possible to have a
script that parses advice_setting in advice.c to find the list of advice
names so Gitaly can disable them? I think (a) would still leave some
advice output from code that uses advice_enabled() rather than
advise_if_enabled() but it should get rid of most of the advice messages.
Best Wishes
Phillip
Now one could say that we shouldn't execute porcelain tools in our
scripts because it is kind of expected that their output may change at
any point in time, and that is certainly true. But the reality is that
there aren't always good plumbing alternatives available.
Furthermore, we are often forced to parse fragile error messages from
such porcelain tools because Git doesn't provide a better way to dissect
errors. Error codes are mostly meaningless and there is no other data
channel available to us than the error message.
These are problems that run deeper than "We want to disable advices",
and we eventually want to address those over time. But it's a long road
to get there, and meanwhile disabling all advice would be something that
helps us make our scripted uses of Git at least a tiny bit more stable.
Patrick
