Re: Regulator updates for 3.3

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

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> writes:

> On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 6:28 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
>>
>> It is a non-starter to unconditionally start an editor.
>
> I really wonder. Because not being default will always lead to really
> odd ways of saying "it should have been default, so we'll make up
> these complex and arbitrary special rules" (like the ones you were
> starting to outline).
>
> So I really suspect it would be easier and more straightforward to
> instead just bite the bullet, and say:
>
>  (a) start an editor by default if both stdin/stdout matched in fstat
> and were istty().
>
>  (b) have some trivial way to disable that default behavior for people
> who really want the legacy behavior. And by "trivial" I mean "set the
> GIT_LEGACY_MERGE environment variable" or something.
>
>  (c) have a "--no-editor" command line switch so that scripts and/or
> users that want to make it explicit (rather than rely on the hacky
> legacy workaround) can do so (and a explicit "--editor" switch to
> enable people to use a GUI editor even if they aren't on a terminal -
> think something IDE environment, whatever).

Hrm. Lack of any quoted line other than the first line from my message,
together with (c) above, makes me suspect that you did not read beyond the
first line before composing this message you are responding to.

> Yes, git has been very good about not breaking semantics. But it's
> happened before too when it needed to happen. We've had much bigger
> breaks (like the whole "git-xyz" to "git xyz" transition, for example,
> which broke a lot of scripts).

Yes, I am learning from the experience to be cautious ;-)

I dunno. You just scrapped the plan for 1.7.10; it may have to be called 2.0
instead.