Re: Questions about git-rev-parse
- From
Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu>
- Date
- Feb 28, 2007, 06:40 UTC
- Message-ID
- <20070228064036.GF2178@thunk.org>
- In-Reply-To
- <Pine.LNX.4.64.0702271921110.12485@woody.linux-foundation.org>
On Tue, Feb 27, 2007 at 07:33:03PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
Show 5 quoted lines
> No, it really is English. At least grammatically. > > A "tree-ish" is "like a tree", exactly like "sheepish" is "like a sheep". > Nothing really git-specific about it, except for it certainly having > become common usage in a way that it may not be normally ;)
Well, in the randomhouse web page you quoted:
Our -ish is a suffix that forms adjectives from nouns or other adjectives. Some of the senses existed in Old English (then spelled -isc but pronounced the same way), such as 'of, being, or pertaining to', used to form adjectives indicating a national, ethnic, or religious origin (British, Jewish).
it claims that the -ish suffix forms an _adjective_. But in the sense of
git describe <committish>
In the git world we are using "committish" (and in the documentation sometimes we use committish and treeish, and other times we use commit-ish and tree-ish) as a _noun_, and not an adjective. So I'm still going to take a bit of issue that it's grammatical English, and I still think that "tree_specifier" and "commit_specifier" would have been clearer.
In any case, I note that in the git(7) man page, there is a formal definition of tree-ish, but not of commit-ish. Would this patch to Documentation/git.txt be correct?
diff --git a/Documentation/git.txt b/Documentation/git.txt index 9a74747..ff693c3 100644 --- a/Documentation/git.txt +++ b/Documentation/git.txt @@ -241,6 +241,12 @@ Identifier Terminology operate on a <tree> object but automatically dereferences <commit> and <tag> objects that point at a <tree>. +<commit-ish>:: + Indicates a commit or tag object name. A + command that takes a <commit-ish> argument ultimately wants to + operate on a <commit> object but automatically dereferences + <tag> objects that point at a <commit>. + <type>:: Indicates that an object type is required. Currently one of: `blob`, `tree`, `commit`, or `tag`. - Ted