Subject: Re: [PATCH] RFC: Introduce '.gitorderfile'

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2017 16:54:38 -0700

Jeff King <[email-masked]> writes:

> I could see somebody arguing that format-patch should respect a project
> preference, since its primary purpose is to communicate your work to the
> rest of the project.
>
> But then you could make a similar argument for other diff options, too.

Yeah, and that opens a whole can of worms.

We let projects to ship clean/smudge or textconv filters and also
mark paths to which these tools may be of help, but we do not let
projects to automatically enable them in the cloned repository.  The
projects must _tell_ the user how to run the last step (e.g. "There
is a tools/setup-my-clone script shipped with the source; running it
will add necessary configurations to work better with our project").

I do not think usefulness of diff.orderfile is being questioned, but
I think it is something we should treat just like any other thing
that affects repository configuration.  A .gitorderfile that allows
the project to behave as if we allowed to auto-enable just one thing
in the clone, while not allowing others, a source of issues and
unnecessary headaches later.

Besides, diff-order is *not* the only order that matters in the use
of the system, and we _will_ regret the name ".gitorderfile" later,
as people would start making noises about forcing ls-files and other
things to also show the list following that order.