Subject: Re: [PATCH 00/19] Add git-list-files

From: Jeff King <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2014 00:42:26 -0500

On Sun, Nov 30, 2014 at 03:55:48PM +0700, Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy wrote:

> This is something else that's been sitting in my tree for a while now.
> It adds "git list-files", intended to be aliased as "ls" with your
> favourite display options.

When I read the subject, I thought "why isn't this called git-ls?". Then
when I read this paragraph, I thought "if the point is for everybody to
make their own ls alias, why do we need list-files at all, instead of
just adding options to ls-files"?

I'll let you decide which (if any) you'd like to answer. :)

My guesses:

  1. If it were "git-ls", it would stomp on existing aliases people have
     constructed.

  2. If it is a wrapper around ls-files, then the options may be
     constrained; ls-files already squats on useful options like "-d"
     (which, if we are matching traditional ls, is more like our "-t").

I somewhat feel like (1) can be mitigated by the fact that your command
is what people were probably trying to approximate with their aliases,
and that as porcelain it should be very configurable (so they should be
able to accomplish the same things as their aliases). But I dunno. I do
not have an "ls" alias, so I am biased. :)

As a side note, I wonder if it would be sensible to whitelist some
commands as porcelain, and allow aliases to override them (either
entirely, or just to add-in some options).

-Peff