Earlier we added a patch to unconditionally downgrade 'always' that is set to the color.ui configuration variable. This was done to correc the unintended regression to "git add -i" that was caused by two earlier mistakes that we no longer can undo.
- The "add -i" command wants to parse output from "git diff-index" plumbing. The plumbing commands started paying attention to color configuration variables (which is a mistaken "solution" to cover another mistake), which caused people who have color.ui set to "always" to see breakage, as their "git diff-index" started coloring its output even when "git add -i" wanted to read it and parse it (without expecting to see any colors in its input); - The mistake the mistaken "solution" wanted to cover was that some time ago we started to automatically color the output (i.e. color when the output goes to the terminal) by default, but did so even to the plumbing commands. As many plumbing commands do not even have their own color control, it made it impossible to disable this auto-coloring--a mistaken "solution" was to pay attention to "git -c color.ui=never" from the command line. It turns out that there are many third-party scripts that do want to read colored output from our tools and the way they do so is to run "git -c color.ui=always cmd", which is a way to defeat any end-user settings and force coloured output reliably---at least they thought that they can rely on it working, that is. We saw one report of such a private tool getting broken on list, and I've seen another one inside $work. Let's keep "git -c color.ui=always cmd" form "working", while downgrading the setting made in the configuration files to "auto", to placate both camps. Let's also discourage use of 'always' and leave the door open for us to introduce "git --default-color=<what> cmd" later as a substitute for "git -c color.ui=<what>". Jeff King (1): color: downgrade "always" to "auto" only for on-disk configuration Junio C Hamano (1): color: discourage use of ui.color=always Documentation/config.txt | 2 +- color.c | 24 ++++++++++++++++++++++-- 2 files changed, 23 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-) -- 2.15.0-rc1-151-g44fe2f342f
