Subject: Re: git gui: Possible to see which commands are executed?

From: "Shawn O. Pearce" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 May 2008 16:31:53 -0400

Sverre Rabbelier <[email-masked]> wrote:
> >
> > That is probably difficult.  Some of the code internally is more
> > about stringing the right sequence of plumbing together than it
> > is about a particular user action.  I think it would take a bit of
> > work to make it do this, and I just don't see a reason to do it.
> 
> The reason would be to make the switch from using git-gui only to
> using the commandline too... the again, it'd be cutting your own hand
> (or is it "throat" in English...) to make that transition easier.

I'm not worried about users leaving git-gui.  Hell, if git-gui
was just git on training wheels and all git users left git-gui
after a while for the command line that would be telling as it
says the graphical interface is not desired.  Or that git-gui's
interface is not well suited to the task.

Far from it.  Some users like git-gui for its ability to show
the modified files, and let you stage/unstage individual hunks.
Others like its ability to perform checkout+pull in one mouse
click.  Many like to point at things with a rodent than to use
the keyboard and enter (to them) isoteric commands.

Right now there are really only two git GUIs; git-gui and QGit.
Each has its strengths.  Maybe this time next year we will have
a 3rd; name yet to be determined but it would come out of the
egit/jgit project as a stand-alone SWT/Java based Git UI.
 
> > CVS clients that show CVS commands can easily do so, because they
> > are directly executing the commands they show you.  This is likely
> > also true of SVN commands.  But git-gui on Git, that's a whole
> > different animal.
> 
> Ah, I didn't realise git-gui does stuff that you can't really do
> through the regular porcelain. In that case it would indeed be
> impossible to print the regular porcelain commands. I think the
> '--trace' option should be advertised as 'debugging option' so that
> the user can see what is going on in the case something goes wrong
> perhaps?

Yes.  I'll send Junio a patch for Documentation/git-gui.txt and
describe it as a debugging option, and also mention that the commands
it displays aren't all meant to be invoked by mortals.

-- 
Shawn.