On 2024-05-07 02:21, Junio C Hamano wrote:
Dragan Simic <dsimic@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
See, the creation factor is described in the documentation as some
fudge
factor, specified as a percentage. Without going through the actual
source code in detail, a question that pops up in my mind is why do we
need to use 999 or 9999 as the new default value? Shouldn't 99 or 100
be good enough instead, if it's a percentage? I'd assume that the
same
question might be asked by other Git users.
It is very much deliberate to choose a value beyond 100. Setting
the value to such a large value was designed to force somebody to
ask that question: "what does the value mean?" [*], and in a sense
it already has achieved one half of its objective ;-).
Ah, I see, it's also meant to provoke users' curiosity a bit. :)
We never had an satisfactory update to the range-diff documentation
when we discussed this parameter in the past. It was stated that
the unit to express the value for creation-factor was called
"percent", but it seems that nobody had a good explanation that can
be given to a layperson what that percent means (e.g., what is it
relative to? what it means to have that value at 100% as opposed to
say 50%?). Somebody should come up with an easy-to-understand
explanation suitable for users after reading and digesting the
overly technical "algorithm" section of the manual, and forcing
ourselves to do a good job at it is the other half of its objective.
Yes, the whole percentage thing is a bit unclear. I'm going through
the ALGORITHM section of the git-range-diff(1) man page, which could
also use some wording and formatting improvements. I'll see to send
a patch that improves it a bit later.
[Footnote]
* Having more than 100 as a value that is measured in "percent" is
not unusual, by the way. You can zoom into a picture at
magnification level of 400%, for example.
Of course. For example, I use 120% as the default scaling in my web
browser, to compensate for the rather high value of the screen DPI.
