Junio C Hamano <gitster <at> pobox.com> writes: > > enrico <enrico.guiraud <at> gmail.com> writes: > > > Hello all, > > I have encountered a couple of non-necessary difficulties when editing a > > patch during a `git add -p`. > > > > Firstly, the help message says > > "To remove '-' lines, make them ' ' lines (context)." > > which is a bit confusing because that "them" refers to '-', not to 'lines'. > > I think that sentence refers to a line line this in a patch: > > -This is what the line used to be > > as a '-'-line. A line that does not change between preimage and > postimage have SP instead of '-' at the beginning, and the sentence > seems to refer to it as a ' '-line. So from that reading, "turning > '-'-lines that you do not want to loes into ' '-lines" is perfectly > sensible phrasing.
I agree it is, and that little dash would definitely make the message less ambiguous. Git has a way to "explain itself" to its users so that they can become better as they use it, and these sort of messages play a very important part in this learning process. > > In any case, "edit" is about giving a low-level access and precise > control to people who are familiar with (1) what each line of "diff" > output means and (2) what is done to them by "patch" (rather, in > Git's context, "apply"). > > I agree with you that "edit" mode is a too-advanced tool for those > who are not comfortable with these two things. A solution would > however not be to modify "edit" mode (which would affect those who > are prepared to and want to use the "low-level access and precise > control" to their advantage), but to introduce an easier-to-use, > and perhaps a bit limited for safety, mode for those who are not the > target audience for "edit" mode. > > The "split" subcommand to split the hunk before applying was an > attempt to go in that direction; it never allows you the user to > make an arbitrary change to corrupt the patch and make it unusable. > Perhaps you can mimick its spirit and come up with a new "guarded > edit" command? > I am not sure we are talking about the same issue. I am not pointing out that git is unsafe to less-than-very-expert users. Much more trivially, I am saying that the current behaviour of the "edit" mode, when coupled with hunk splitting, is needlessly frustrating (because of the issue described in the link I provided in my previous message). That's why I would argue that git would help wanna-be-experts better if it told them, in some way, that editing after splitting is generally a bad idea. Advanced users would not be bothered by this warning/lack-of-edit-after-splitting because, I think, they don't do it anyway. They already know it is a pain, so they either split or edit. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
