Re: [PATCH] Use 'fast-forward' all over the place

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

Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> writes:

>> I suspect the patch would have been much easier to the reviewers it it
>> stated somewhere in the log message:
>>
>>  (1) how the mechanical change was produced;
>
> There wasn't such.

That is actually a bad news; it is even worse than mechanical spotting
followed by manual inspection.  It would force us feel _more_ worried, as
we would then need to grep for leftovers that your manual conversion may
not have caught.  Sigh...

>>  (2) what criteria was used to choose between leaving the mechanical
>>     change as-is and rewording them manually; and
>
> If it wasn't straight forward. I considered the following straightforward:
> fast forward -> fast-forward
> fast forwarded -> fast-forwarded
> fast forwarding -> fast-forwarding
> fast forwardable -> fast-forwardable
> non-fast forward -> non-fast-forward
> Fast forward -> Fast-forward
> Fast forwarding -> Fast-forwarding

All of these are what "s/([fF])ast forward/$1ast-forward/g" does, aren't
they?

> I couldn't parse that. From what I can see "Fast forward" was
> emphasized because the author thought the words didn't make much sense
> separated. Now that the word is fast-forward, there's no need to
> emphasize.

Even after your patch, hunk beginning on line 1384 of the
user-manual says

    ... then git just performs a "fast-forward"; the head of the ...

and I think you did the right thing by keeping these dq here.  This is the
first occurrence of the word followed by its explanation and for that
reason, the word deserves to be emphasized---IOW, the context calls for an
emphasis.

In the "Important note!" part, we talk about the pull operation that
normally creates a merge commit, and _in contrast_, under a particular
condition (namely, "no local changes"), it does something different
(namely, a "fast-forward").  We should keep the emphasis on "fast-forward"
here for exactly the same reason---the context calls for an emphasis.

I was about to read the rest of the patch (the non-doc part) but instead I
ended up spending another 20 minutes writing this message, so the review
by me on the remainder has to wait til sometime later.