From: Theodore Tso Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2007 06:40:36 GMT Subject: Re: Questions about git-rev-parse Message-ID: <20070228064036.GF2178@thunk.org> In-Reply-To: On Tue, Feb 27, 2007 at 07:33:03PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote: > 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 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 object but automatically dereferences and objects that point at a . +:: + Indicates a commit or tag object name. A + command that takes a argument ultimately wants to + operate on a object but automatically dereferences + objects that point at a . + :: Indicates that an object type is required. Currently one of: `blob`, `tree`, `commit`, or `tag`. - Ted