Re: [PATCH] clean: new option --exclude-from

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

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

> .... So maybe "clean" is really the only place where people care
> about such ad-hoc exclusion. Or maybe this an opportunity to add:
>
>   git --exclude='*.o' clean
>
> I dunno. I cannot think of a time when I would have used any of those
> options myself.

Me either and I do not think I ever wanted to use -e to "clean".

I do not think we should liberally add options that apply to
anything "git" in the first place [*1*].  Limit them to ones that
are really special and fundamental that changes the way Git
operates, i.e. "Where is our $GIT_DIR?" is a good thing for users to
be able to tell "git" itself.  Compared to that, the ignore patterns
is a fringe that is used only by commands that care about the
working tree (e.g. the global option in "git --exclude='*.o'
ls-tree" would be meaningless).


[Footnote]

*1* It would add unnecessary confusion to the end users; they have
    to decide if they need to pass an option before or after the
    subcommand name.  If the motivation behind the "git --option cmd"
    is to share code and semantics for common "--option", we should
    instead further refactor command line option handling, just like
    the code for config handling allows us to share config_default.