The synopsys text and the usage string of subcommands that read list
of things from the standard input are often shown like this:
git gostak [--distim] < <list-of-doshes>
This is problematic in a number of ways:
* The way to use these commands is more often to feed them the
output from another command, not feed them from a file.
* Manual pages outside Git, commands that operate on the data read
from the standard input, e.g "sort", "grep", "sed", etc., are not
described with such a "< redirection-from-file" in their synopsys
text. Our doing so introduces inconsistency.
* We do not insist on where the output should go, by saying
git gostak [--distim] < <list-of-doshes> > <output>
* As it is our convention to enclose placeholders inside <braket>,
the redirection operator followed by a placeholder filename
becomes very hard to read, both in the documentation and in the
help text.
Let's clean them all up, after making sure that the documentation
clearly describes the modes that take information from the standard
input and what kind of things are expected on the input.
[jc: stole example for fmt-merge-msg from Jonathan]
Helped-by: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Some users do want to write a line that begin with a pound sign, #,
in their commit log message. Many tracking system recognise
a token of #<bugid> form, for example.
The support we offer these use cases is not very friendly to the end
users. They have a choice between
- Don't do it. Avoid such a line by rewrapping or indenting; and
- Use --cleanup=whitespace but remove all the hint lines we add.
Give them a way to set a custom comment char, e.g.
$ git -c core.commentchar="%" commit
so that they do not have to do either of the two workarounds.
[jc: although I started the topic, all the tests and documentation
updates, many of the call sites of the new strbuf_add_commented_*()
functions, and the change to git-submodule.sh scripted Porcelain are
from Ralf.]
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Signed-off-by: Ralf Thielow <ralf.thielow@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Tell the user what this command is intended for, and expand the
description of what it does.
Signed-off-by: Conrad Irwin <conrad.irwin@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
The comment on top of stripspace() claims that the buffer
will no longer be NUL-terminated. However, this has not been
the case at least since the move to using strbuf in 2007.
Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
This shrinks the top-level directory a bit, and makes it much more
pleasant to use auto-completion on the thing. Instead of
[torvalds@nehalem git]$ em buil<tab>
Display all 180 possibilities? (y or n)
[torvalds@nehalem git]$ em builtin-sh
builtin-shortlog.c builtin-show-branch.c builtin-show-ref.c
builtin-shortlog.o builtin-show-branch.o builtin-show-ref.o
[torvalds@nehalem git]$ em builtin-shor<tab>
builtin-shortlog.c builtin-shortlog.o
[torvalds@nehalem git]$ em builtin-shortlog.c
you get
[torvalds@nehalem git]$ em buil<tab> [type]
builtin/ builtin.h
[torvalds@nehalem git]$ em builtin [auto-completes to]
[torvalds@nehalem git]$ em builtin/sh<tab> [type]
shortlog.c shortlog.o show-branch.c show-branch.o show-ref.c show-ref.o
[torvalds@nehalem git]$ em builtin/sho [auto-completes to]
[torvalds@nehalem git]$ em builtin/shor<tab> [type]
shortlog.c shortlog.o
[torvalds@nehalem git]$ em builtin/shortlog.c
which doesn't seem all that different, but not having that annoying
break in "Display all 180 possibilities?" is quite a relief.
NOTE! If you do this in a clean tree (no object files etc), or using an
editor that has auto-completion rules that ignores '*.o' files, you
won't see that annoying 'Display all 180 possibilities?' message - it
will just show the choices instead. I think bash has some cut-off
around 100 choices or something.
So the reason I see this is that I'm using an odd editory, and thus
don't have the rules to cut down on auto-completion. But you can
simulate that by using 'ls' instead, or something similar.
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
