From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2008 17:20:44 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/2] hard-code the empty tree object
Message-ID: <20080215172043.GA24221@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <7vabm2i1pf.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Fri, Feb 15, 2008 at 09:11:56AM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> > We also hard-code the special ref '{}' as an alias for the
> > empty tree. Users may refer to the empty tree by its
> > sha1 or by '{}'.
> 
> I think the users of hard coded empty tree are oddballs.  Let's
> not be too cute and instead leave it in the add -i patch.  {} is
> already too cute.

By "it" I assume you mean "the sha1 of the empty tree", meaning to not
include the {} bit at all?

I am fine with that, as I don't think anyone has even mentioned a
workflow where such a shorthand would be beneficial to users. The only
one I can think of is to represent some tree using diff tools (e.g., "git
diff --stat {} HEAD" instead of some variant on ls-files), but I have
never once actually wanted to do that.

Should I re-send, or do you want to just markup the existing patches?

-Peff