Suggestion to change the default replacement text about git-filter-repo HOT 3 CLOSED

I actually copied this piece of functionality, including the default, from BFG Repo Cleaner (https://rtyley.github.io/bfg-repo-cleaner/); --replace-text was one of their really awesome ideas. They used this default for years and years without changing it. Honestly, I came close to making the replacement be an empty string or just erroring out if no replacement was specified (I mean, when does some random replacement ever make any sense??), but deferred to their experience and made things more similar for those coming from that tool. If I were to make a change to the default, which I'm not sure if I want to do, it'd be to change it in one of those two ways.

But, having a --default-replacement flag of some sort to allow the user to switch the default without having to specify it on every line might make sense.

from git-filter-repo.

from git-filter-repo.

Actually, I went a slightly different route. I stored the default replacement text in a variable that an accessing script can modify. Also, I create a new contrib example named "no-op-example" (see commit bd2c9c4 (contrib: new simple no-op-example, 2020-06-06)) which provides identical behavior to filter-repo by doing the right import and calling the right high-level functions, so that people have a simple starting point for modification.

If you take the no-op-example and just add the line of code

fr.FilteringOptions.default_replace_text = b'NEW DEFAULT REPLACEMENT TEXT'

after the definition of fr and before the call to filter.run(), then you can run

no-op-example <filter-repo args>

and you'd get the same behavior as

git filter-repo <filter-repo args>

except that the default replacement text would be NEW DEFAULT REPLACEMENT TEXT instead of ***REMOVED***

from git-filter-repo.