Re: About git pretty

["David Tweed" <david.tweed@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 12:41 AM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> "Felipe Contreras" <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> writes:
>> It is just me or 'pretty full' doesn't exactly convey the meaning of
>> the action to execute?
[snip]
>> If you like the idea I can work on a patch.
>
> FWIW, I don't like it.

It's probably much too late to change conventions given the number of
deployed scripts, but one of the annoyances for me about git is that a
lot of the commands/options names are based on what the code does/is
written rather than relating to what a user who doesn't know or care
about the inner workings expects as output. For instance, I imagine
the --pretty gets its name because a pretty printing routine, called
pretty_print_commit in the code, was written but the name probably
doesn't make much sense to anyone who's not from a computer science
background. Likewise the options --hard, --soft and --mixed to git
reset lack any natural mnemonic structure. (I'm sure one can be
contrived, but I doubt it'd be particularly natural.) Then there's
git-fsck and gitk.

It's not remotely a big problem but it is something that I'd imagine
would have been done differently with hindsight.

-- 
cheers, dave tweed__________________________
david.tweed@gmail.com
Rm 124, School of Systems Engineering, University of Reading.
"while having code so boring anyone can maintain it, use Python." --
attempted insult seen on slashdot