Hi, > That woul be surprising. Git was not invented until early April 2005. At > the moment I still wait (impatiently, because then my current contract > ends) for April 2008. > > The important thing to realise is that time is such a wonderful dimension > to be exposed to: not only do you live (experience things that you did not > know before), but also other people live and learn. > > IOW even Linus realised that the git-xxx format is not _that_ good. Which > is why -- as you should have realised if you did not subscribe 5 minutes > ago -- we do not recommend git-xxx at all, but insist on "git xxx". I didn't realize that. Git doesn't give any warnings, and manpages give the dashed examples only. Although I was subscribed to git-list from day 1, I must admit that these days I don't read this list too closely (hence being caught in surprise at this point). I assume things started with the following commit; but really, can we please start with some deprecation notice before really moving it around in user-visible location. commit 36e5e70e0f40cf7ca4351b8159d68f8560a2805f Author: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Sat Jun 30 11:49:17 2007 -0700 Start deprecating "git-command" in favor of "git command" I realize that a lot of people use the "git-xyzzy" format, and we have various historical reasons for it, but I also think that most people have long since started thinking of the git command as a single command with various subcommands, and we've long had the documentation talk about it that way. Slowly migrating away from the git-xyzzy format would allow us to eventually no longer install hundreds of binaries (even if most of them are symlinks or hardlinks) in users $PATH, and the _original_ reasons for it (implementation issues and bash completion) are really long long gone. Using "git xyzzy" also has some fundamental advantages, like the ability to specify things like paging ("git -p xyzzy") and making the whole notion of aliases act like other git commands (which they already do, but they do *not* have a "git-xyzzy" form!) Anyway, while actually removing the "git-xyzzy" things is not practical right now, we can certainly start slowly to deprecate it internally inside git itself - in the shell scripts we use, and the test vectors. This patch adds a "remove-dashes" makefile target, which does that. It isn't particularly efficient or smart, but it *does* successfully rewrite a lot of our shell scripts to use the "git xyzzy" form for all built-in commands. (For non-builtins, the "git xyzzy" format implies an extra execve(), so this script leaves those alone). So apply this patch, and then run make remove-dashes make test git commit -a to generate a much larger patch that actually starts this transformation. (The only half-way subtle thing about this is that it also fixes up git-filter-branch.sh for the new world order by adding quoting around the use of "git-commit-tree" as an argument. It doesn't need it in that format, but when changed into "git commit-tree" it is no longer a single word, and the quoting maintains the old behaviour). NOTE! This does not yet mean that you can actually stop installing the "git-xyzzy" binaries for the builtins. There are some remaining places that want to use the old form, this just removes the most obvious ones that can easily be done automatically. Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> regards, junichi -- dancer@{debian.org,netfort.gr.jp} Debian Project - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html