Re: [PATCH] Allow git-diff exit with codes similar to diff(1)

[Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>]

Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net> writes:

> I've been telling you since the #git session that I know that is
> *different* from how "diff" works, and I think everybody agrees
> if we were doing git from scratch today we would have done exit
> status with 0/1/other to signal no-change, have-diff and error.
>
> But the established way for scripts that use plumbing is
>
>  - to check error with $? (or ... || )
>  - to check modified-or-not with output
>
> and people who have been learning from the scripts (we used to
> have lot more scripts) would have picked up that pattern.
> That's why I already told you that --exit-status is the right
> thing to do if we were doing it from scratch, but is a wrong
> thing to do at this point.

Correction.

s/--exit-status is/doing --exit-status without such an explicit option is/.

> Maybe in a release as big as 1.5.0
> that we pre-announce a lot of interface changes.
>
> In short, Linus is right in that the current exit code is not
> useful to see what the end users are interested in (and they are
> not in the business of debugging git, and diff would error out
> only when the repository has problems, perhaps a corrupt object
> or something like that).  But being not useful and being
> currently not relied upon are two different things.
>
> And I am being conservative, especially after a big release.