hg -q log ... prints changeset number.

[Harvey Chapman]

On Apr 9, 2012, at 12:41 PM, Masklinn wrote:

> On 2012-04-09, at 18:35 , Harvey Chapman wrote:
> 
>> On Apr 9, 2012, at 11:33 AM, Masklinn wrote:
>> 
>>> Surely there's no point to a command which doesn't display anything.
>>> Considering the normal log, this looks plenty quiet to me.
>> 
>> In defense of Alan:
>> There are plenty of unix commands that emit no regular output when told to run quietly but they do return an exit code indicating the result. Alan justifiably assumed that Mercurial's -q would fit the familiar pattern and when it didn't, he assumed that one tool, Mercurial, was broken, and not the established pattern.
>> 
> I'm not sure I would call the pattern "familiar" or "established" since
> its implementation is pretty arbitrary (as is repetitions of qs to lower
> the software's verbosity further).
> 
> And I would not expect *log* to be silent on a match anyway, `id` maybe
> but definitely not log.

Fair enough. I would have incorrectly assumed that quiet meant no output and not "less verbose". I don't have any problem with how it works, I simply see the potential for confusion. Although, I'm also not advocating for a --less-verbose option. :)

Perhaps, just rewriting this line from hg help log would suffice:

from: -q --quiet                   suppress output

to:   -q --quiet                   suppress most output
      -q --quiet                   less output
something like that.