On 10/22/07, Hyrum K. Wright <hyrum_wright@mail.utexas.edu> wrote:
> 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.
To me too, this feature feels like feature creep. I'm not on IRC to
voice my concerns, but it definitely doesn't pass the 'if it can be
written in a one-liner on *nix, we don't integrate it' test. If people
are using Windows, they generally don't use the command line, so I
guess that's not our target audience. (BTW: Even on Windows there's a
grep available, albeit not in a default windows install.)
I'm not hot about it, would prefer not to add it, but I don't see a
reason to make a fuss about it either.
bye,
Erik.
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Received on Mon Oct 22 21:46:02 2007