Re: Questions about git-rev-parse

On Tue, Feb 27, 2007 at 06:40:47PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

So while I'm asking questions, where did the "*-ish" terminology come from, anyway? For someone who is a relative newbie, terms like tree-ish and commit-ish seems like some kind of strange, git jargon. And this is the first time I've come across porcelian-ish.

I had the mental model (which I had intuited, since no git documentation I could find had bothered to explain it) that -ish meant something like specifier, so "tree-ish" meant tree specifier, so a commit id could get dereferenced into a tree id, so it could be used to specify a tree.

But that explanation doesn't explain "porcelain-ish".  

So what does -ish mean, really? Where did it come from? And if it does add value to use this wierd bit of git jargon, can we document it somewhere, preferably in a tutorial and main git man page? It used in too many places that it's probably not worth it to rip it out, but I can tell you that for someone who is learning git from the ground up, it would be easier if we used some term like <tree_specifier> instead of <tree-ish>.

Regards,

						- Ted