Re: parse-options does not recognize "unspecified" behavior

["SZEDER Gábor" <szeder@ira.uka.de>]

> Yes, I think in general, "-v" and "-q" should work as opposites. But
> that is not the case with commit, where "-v" and "-q" operate on totally
> separate messages. I think that is a UX mistake, and we would not do
> it that way if designing from scratch. But we're stuck with it for
> historical reasons (I'd probably name "--verbose" as "--show-diff" or
> something if writing it today).

Yeah, as a long-time 'git commit -v' user I never really thought about
the name of the option, but when I pointed out the multiple verbose
levels it struck me as a rather unfortunate name for this feature,
too.  Oh, well, we are stuck with it indeed.

However, that doesn't mean that we have to spread this badly chosen
name from options to config variables, does it?  I think that if we
are going to define a new config variable today, then it should be
named properly, and it's better not to call it 'commit.verbose', but
'commit.showDiff' or something.  Perhaps we could even define two new
config variables: 'commit.showDiff' for the diff of the changes to be
committed (= '-v'), and 'commit.showUnstagedDiff' for the - wait for
it! - unstaged changes (= '-v -v').  Not sure about the variable
names, though, because "plain" 'git diff' shows unstaged changes,
while 'git diff --cached' shows staged changes.

Furthermore, it doesn't mean that we can't add properly named command
line option(s) and state that '-v|--verbose' is a synonym to
'--show-diff' (maybe even deprecate '--verbose'), but I don't want to
squeeze even more into a GSOC micro project.


Gábor