Comment by js2
6 hours ago
It's not useless information, any more than the tachometer or a temperature gauge instead of an "idiot light" in a car is useless information. Again, "because git is an open-source project written by nerds, it shows you all of this information. Feel free to ignore it!"
If you don't want it, use `--quiet`. I like that it's there by default since it's useful when I need it and ignorable when I don't.
Of all the things to complain about git...
How often do you really need to look at that info while doing normal work?
Because to me and to the very vast majority of git users it is totally irrelevant.
It is nice that the info is available, but the more sane default would be to hide under a verbose flag not the other way around.
Imagine typing cd folder/ and have the whole filesystem subtree be displayed in the terminal. You are free to ignore it, but it is useless and inconvenient nonetheless
Are you not a programmer? Do you not ever find yourself having to debug an issue? When you have to, are you not glad when there's sufficient information in the log files to do so, even though 99.9% of the time you never look at the logs?
> Imagine typing cd folder
It's not comparable. `cd` is a local command (technically a shell built-in) that completes instantly (unless you cd to a hung NFS mount...). So it honors the Unix philosophy of emitting nothing on success.
But cloning is a network operation. And it's normal for networking tools to output progress by default. See `wget` and `curl`.
The problem with hiding progress under `--verbose` is that by the time you need the information (why is this taking so long?), it's too late to add `--verbose`. You'd have to cancel the command and run it again losing progress.
If you don't want it, then use `--quiet` and move on with your day.
(Sure you could make it smarter by deferring outputting anything until it realizes the operation is taking some time. Patches welcomed.)