Subject: Re: [PATCH v3] add --abbrev to 'git cherry'

From: Stephen Boyd <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 30 May 2009 21:53:57 -0700

Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Stephen Boyd <[email-masked]> writes:
>> You might want to look at using the parse options API. It has options
>> for verbose and abbrev builtin, so you don't have to do any extra
>> work....
>
> Why do people even think a change like this to a _plumbing_ command is
> desirable?
>
> Admittedly, there already is "verbose" option that adds redundant
> information to the output of this particular plumbing, which might
> arguably be equally wrong as what this patch does, but I think it is
> excusable.  At least it lets the Porcelain script that uses the command
> avoid calling 'git cat-file commit' to find out the title of the commit.
>
> But --abbrev does not even add any information.  If implemented correctly
> (which earlier iteration did not even do), it may not lose information by
> choping the output too short to make it ambiguous, but as others pointed
> out about using grep in the calling Porcelain to filter (or more likely,
> sift the lines into "+" and "-" bins) to shoot down -d/-D options, I do
> not see the point of adding --abbrev to this plumbing command very much.

I was tempted to say the same thing, but I decided to leave it up to the
maintainer ;-) Maybe if there was a compelling use case it would make
more sense?

Or, would it make more sense to just use git-log? Right now you can do
git log --oneline --cherry-pick <head>..<upstream> and get close. Maybe
we can add a "--cherry" option to git-log which will act like git-cherry
by finding unmerged commits?