Subject: Re: [PATCH] doc: fetch: document `--jobs=0` behavior

From: Patrick Steinhardt <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2026 09:51:39 +0100

On Thu, Feb 19, 2026 at 10:59:10AM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Patrick Steinhardt <[email-masked]> writes:
> 
> > On Wed, Feb 18, 2026 at 07:32:39PM +0000, Daniel D. Beck via GitGitGadget wrote:
> >> diff --git a/Documentation/fetch-options.adoc b/Documentation/fetch-options.adoc
> >> index fcba46ee9e..e15cbc51f2 100644
> >> --- a/Documentation/fetch-options.adoc
> >> +++ b/Documentation/fetch-options.adoc
> >> @@ -234,6 +234,8 @@ endif::git-pull[]
> >>  `--jobs=<n>`::
> >>  	Parallelize all forms of fetching up to _<n>_ jobs at a time.
> >>  +
> >> +A value of 0 will use some reasonable default.
> >
> > Can't we do better though than saying "some reasonable default"? As a
> > user I would wonder what this is even supposed to mean. True, we don't
> > do so either in the documentation of "fetch.parallel". But arguably, we
> > should update both sites to reflect the status quo.
> >
> > Going into the code we seem to fall back to `online_cpus()`. So should
> > we document this accordingly?
> 
> I do not have time to dig this out myself from ancient discussion
> threads, but we probably had the same discussion when "git config
> --help" described the fetch.parallel with exactly the same phrasing
> and decided to leave the exact implementation detail out of the
> end-user facing documentation.

Doesn't look like it. The thread in question is [1], and neither the
commit message nor the discussion around the patch mentioned why we
don't document what the reasonable default is.

Dscho, do you remember by chance why you decided to not be more specific
here?

Thanks!

Patrick

[1]: <[email-masked]>