Subject: Re: Re* Re* [PATCH v4 0/3] advice: add "all" option to disable all hints

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 06 May 2024 17:21:16 -0700

Dragan Simic <[email-masked]> writes:

> See, the creation factor is described in the documentation as some fudge
> factor, specified as a percentage.  Without going through the actual
> source code in detail, a question that pops up in my mind is why do we
> need to use 999 or 9999 as the new default value?  Shouldn't 99 or 100
> be good enough instead, if it's a percentage?  I'd assume that the same
> question might be asked by other Git users.

It is very much deliberate to choose a value beyond 100.  Setting
the value to such a large value was designed to force somebody to
ask that question: "what does the value mean?" [*], and in a sense
it already has achieved one half of its objective ;-).

We never had an satisfactory update to the range-diff documentation
when we discussed this parameter in the past.  It was stated that
the unit to express the value for creation-factor was called
"percent", but it seems that nobody had a good explanation that can
be given to a layperson what that percent means (e.g., what is it
relative to?  what it means to have that value at 100% as opposed to
say 50%?).  Somebody should come up with an easy-to-understand
explanation suitable for users after reading and digesting the
overly technical "algorithm" section of the manual, and forcing
ourselves to do a good job at it is the other half of its objective.

[Footnote]

 * Having more than 100 as a value that is measured in "percent" is
   not unusual, by the way.  You can zoom into a picture at
   magnification level of 400%, for example.