From: Kevin Ballard <kevin@sb.org>
Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2010 00:33:31 GMT
Subject: Re: [RFC] Using gitrevisions :/search style with other operators
Message-ID: <050F42EE-34FE-499F-B632-471597EB4881@sb.org>
In-Reply-To: <7vlj52jakh.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Nov 9, 2010, at 4:18 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Yann Dirson <dirson@bertin.fr> writes:
> 
>>>> Syntax like origin/pu^{/Merge 'kb/blame-author-email'}2 would be
>> ...
>> Another idea: origin/pu^{:2/Merge 'kb/blame-author-email'}
> 
> What are these "2"s?
> 
> You need to question how you figured out the commit you want is the second
> one reachable (in whatever traversal order) from something in the first
> place.  Didn't you use "git log --oneline" or something to find that out?
> At that point, you have the object name already, so I doubt such a
> "counting" feature is of much practical use.

The particular case that prompted this for me was I knew I had created two
commits called "WIP", scheduled for renaming later, and I wanted to quickly
look at the contents of the first one. I would have loved to be able to
type something like `git show :/WIP/2`. I suppose this situation may be rare
enough not to bother supporting it in the new syntax. With the new syntax
it will be possible to do something like `git show HEAD^{:/WIP}^^{:/WIP}`, but
that looks awfully awkward.

Another thing to consider - the current :/foo syntax searches for the newest
commit reachable from any ref. Using the ^{} syntax will require specifying
a ref first. I'm not sure this is a problem though, as I'm not really sure why
:/foo searches from all refs to begin with.

-Kevin Ballard