Eric Gillespie wrote:
> I've gotten many complaints from users over the years about the
> inability to see just the files with conflicts (especially after
> a giant scrollback-blowing merge), or just the files that need to
> be added, and so on. I give them little grep or sed recipes, but
> they grumble; Windows users hate having to install msys or
> cygwin, and not everyone who uses Unix systems is familiar with
> these tools. Heck, I sometimes waste a few minutes trying to
> come up with just the right regular expression.
>
> So, how about this?
[After writing this, I had a conversation with Eric on IRC. We
basically decided that this is an area of "agree to disagree". I'm
sending this more for posterity than to influence the direction of the
patch. I still have reservations, but I'm willing to put them aside,
since there seems to be enough support, and a low enough maintenance
burden, to justify the idea.]
I can't put my finger on it, but something about this idea doesn't feel
right. It kinda violates the "do one thing, and do it well" philosophy
of command line tools. I just don't see why we need to reinvent grep in
our command line client. (Decent Windows versions of the GNU tools,
which install as stand alone executables are available here:
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/)
I'll admit that I've got a *nix bias, but if folks are using the command
line, on either platform, they should learn how to *use* the command
line. We shouldn't coddle those who use the command line, but don't
want to learn other tools which will make their lives easier elsewhere.
Adding '--filter' gives people a crutch, which we then have to maintain.
-Hyrum
Received on Mon Oct 22 21:27:09 2007