Re: Do we have a convenient way to refer to a specific commit in an already filtered rev-list?

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Oct 4, 2011, 07:05 UTC
Message-ID: <20111004070529.GA6916@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <7v1uutg8xw.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Mon, Oct 03, 2011 at 12:40:43PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 15 quoted lines

> Tzu-Jung Lee <roylee17@gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > And also teach the rev-list to parse or interpret the 'saved' refs differently.
> > So we can have the following use case:
> >
> >    git log branch_foo --author=some_one -S some_string --saved=cached_ref
> >    git log cached_ref
> >    git cherry-pick cached_ref~4
> >    git format-patch cached_ref~6..cached_ref~2
> >
> > I often have such use cases. not sure others would be benefited from
> > such feature.
> > Just asking for comment. :)
> 
> It feels too much hackery for too little gain.

Agreed. It means that each entry in refs/saved is subtly _not_ a ref, but rather a list of refs. Until now, most refs are considered equal with respect to basic things like ref lookup. So if git were to save this, I'm not sure refs/ would be the right place. A reflog would be a bit closer in concept.

But I really don't see the need for git to handle this at all. There is already a general solution:

> $ git log --oneline master..branch --author=A.U.Thor -Spickaxe >foos.txt
> 
> and working from the text file foos.txt at least would not contaminate any
> ref namespace and you do not have to clean them after you are done.

Which works just as well, and is way more flexible. You have to be a little more proficient in using the shell, but that is at least a general skill which transfers to many other programs.

-Peff