Subject: Re: [PATCH v6 0/6] worktree: teach "add" to check out existing branches

From: Thomas Gummerer <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2018 20:30:07 +0100

On 04/08, Eric Sunshine wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 31, 2018 at 11:17 AM, Thomas Gummerer <[email-masked]> wrote:
> > This round should fix all the UI issues Eric found in the last round.
> > The changes I made in a bit more detail:
> >
> > - added a new commit introducing a new hidden --show-new-head-line
> >   flag in 'git reset'.  This is used to suppress the "HEAD is now at
> >   ..."  line that 'git reset --hard' usually prints, so we can replace
> >   it with our own "New worktree HEAD is now at ..." line instead,
> >   while keeping the progress indicator for larger repositories.
> 
> As with Junio, I'm fine with this hidden option (for now), however, I
> think you can take this a step further. Rather than having a (hidden)
> git-reset option which suppresses "HEAD is now at...", instead have a
> (hidden) option which augments the message. For example,
> --new-head-desc="New worktree" would make it output "New worktree HEAD
> is now at...". Changes to builtin/reset.c to support this would hardly
> be larger than the changes you already made.

Something else I just noticed that may make this a worse solution is
that this breaks the sentence in two pieces for translators.  I guess
we could somehow get the "New worktree" part of the option translated,
but that still means that if some language would require to move parts
of the sentence around that would be less than ideal for translation.

Duy pointed this out to me in an earlier patch series, and I think we
should probably not make life harder (or impossible) for translators
if we can avoid it.

Would factoring out what we have in 'print_new_head_line()' into some
common code, maybe in 'pretty.c', and still doing the printing from
here be a reasonable tradeoff?

I think this could potentially even be re-used in other places,
although again I'd like to keep that for a followup series to avoid
scope creep in this one.

> The major benefit is that patch 3/6 no longer has to duplicate the
> code from builtin/reset.c:print_new_head_line() just to print its own
> "New worktree HEAD is now at..." message. (As for the argument that
> "git worktree add" must duplicate that code because it wants the
> message on stderr, whereas git-reset prints it to stdout, I don't see
> why git-worktree puts those messages to stderr in the first place. As
> far as I can tell, it would be equally valid to print them to stdout.)
> 
> > Some examples of the new UI behaviour here for reference:
> >
> >  - guess-remote mode
> >
> >     $ git worktree add --guess-remote ../next
> >     Creating branch 'next'
> >     Branch 'next' set up to track remote branch 'next' from 'origin'.
> >     New worktree HEAD is now at caa68db14 Merge branch 'sb/packfiles-in-repository' into next
> >
> >  - original dwim (create a branch based on the current HEAD)
> >
> >     $ git worktree add ../test
> >     Creating branch 'test'
> >     New worktree HEAD is now at c2a499e6c Merge branch 'jh/partial-clone'
> >
> >  - new dwim (check out existing branch)
> >
> >     $ git worktree add ../test
> >     Checking out branch 'test'
> >     New worktree HEAD is now at c2a499e6c Merge branch 'jh/partial-clone'
> >
> >  - no new branch created
> >
> >     $ git worktree add ../test2 origin/master
> >     New worktree HEAD is now at c2a499e6c Merge branch 'jh/partial-clone'
> 
> I like the "creating" or "checking out" messages we now get for all
> the DWIM cases. I wonder if it would make sense to print "Checkout out
> blah..." for this case too. It's certainly not necessary since the
> user specified <commit-ish> explicitly, but it would make the UI even
> more consistent, and address your subsequent comment about missing
> context above the "Checking out files: ...%" line for this case.
> Thoughts?
> 
> > Compare this to the old UI (new dwim omitted, as there's no old
> > version of that):
> 
> Thanks for contrasting the new with the old. The new output is nicer
> and more helpful.
> 
> > The one thing we are loosing is a context line before "Checking out
> > files:", if no new branch is created.  Personally I feel like that's
> > acceptable, as the user just used the 'git worktree add' command, so
> > it should be intuitive where those files are being checked out.