Re: obnoxious CLI complaints

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> writes:

> First, it would be consistent with how ordinary archivers such as tar
> or zip are used, where you have to specify list of files to archive
> (in our case this list is HEAD).  Second, I'd rather not accidentally
> dump binary to terminal: "git archive [HEAD]" dumps archive to standard
> output.

So does "cat".  I do not agree with your second point.

While I somewhat see the similarity argument, your first point, I am not
sure if it is relevant.  It is not like "tar or zip allows us to say what
files to archive, but git-archive doesn't and it always archives HEAD";
you are saying "they require us to specify, so should we".

But I do not see a strong reason not to default to HEAD.  The case that
would make difference would be to differentiate among

	$ git archive HEAD TAIL
        $ git archive HEAD -- TAIL
        $ git archive -- HEAD TAIL

i.e. what if you happen to have a tracked content called HEAD.  I didn't
check the current command line parser in git-archive understands the "--"
convention for that, but it is not a rocket science to add it if it
doesn't.