Subject: Re: [PATCH] fetch: skip formatting updated refs with `--quiet`

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2021 10:51:55 -0700

Patrick Steinhardt <[email-masked]> writes:

> When fetching, Git will by default print a list of all updated refs in a
> nicely formatted table. In order to come up with this table, Git needs
> to iterate refs twice: first to determine the maximum column width, and
> a second time to actually format these changed refs.
>
> While this table will not be printed in case the user passes `--quiet`,
> we still go out of our way and do all these steps. In fact, we even do
> more work compared to not passing `--quiet`: without the flag, we will
> skip all references in the column width computation which have not been
> updated, but if it is set we will now compute widths for all refs.

Interesting.  This line

	/* uptodate lines are only shown on high verbosity level */
	if (!verbosity && oideq(&ref->peer_ref->old_oid, &ref->old_oid))
		return;

at the beginning of the adjust_refcol_width() function indeed does
not skip if verbosity is negative, so the comment is wrong---it is
not only computed on high verbosity level.  Why doesn't this patch
include a change like this then?

	if (verbosity <= 0 || oideq(&ref->peer_ref->old_oid, &ref->old_oid))
		return;

Another thing I notice is this part from store_updated_refs():

			if (note.len) {
				if (verbosity >= 0 && !shown_url) {
					fprintf(stderr, _("From %.*s\n"),
							url_len, url);
					shown_url = 1;
				}
				if (verbosity >= 0)
					fprintf(stderr, " %s\n", note.buf);
			}

We no longer need to check for verbosity, right?

Other than these two, I like the approach a lot.