From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2012 00:38:55 GMT
Subject: Re: Quickly searching for a note
Message-ID: <20120925003855.GB19586@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <7vk3vl3ixv.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Sat, Sep 22, 2012 at 01:23:56PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Michael J Gruber <git@drmicha.warpmail.net> writes:
> 
> > On my mental scratch pad (yeah, that's where the bald spots are) I have
> > the following more general idea to enhance the revision parser:
> >
> > --limit-run=<script>::
> > --run=<script>:::
> > These options run the script `<script>` on each revision that is walked.
> > The script is run in an environment which has the variables
> > `GIT_<SPECIFIER>` exported, where `<SPECIFIER>` is any of the specifiers
> > for the `--format` option in the long format (the same as for 'git
> > for-each-ref').
> >
> > In the case of `--limit-run`, the return code of `<script>` decides
> > whether the commit is processed further (i.e. shown using the format in
> > effect) or ignored.
> 
> You could argue that the above is not an inpractical solution as
> long as the user of --run, which spawns a new process every time we
> need to check if a commit is worth showing in the log/rev-list
> stream, knows what she is doing and promises not to complain that it
> is no more performant than an external script that reads from
> rev-list output and does the equivalent filtering.
> 
> I personally am not very enthused.

Nor me. I experimented long ago with a perl pipeline that would parse commit
messages and allow Turing-complete grepping. I recall it was noticeably
slow. I cannot imagine what forking for each commit would be like.

Actually, wait, I can imagine it. Git has ~33K commits. Doing 'sh -c
exit' takes on the order of .002s. That's a minute of processing to look
at each commit in "git log", assuming the filtering itself takes 0
seconds.

> If we linked with an embeddable scripting language interpreter
> (e.g. lua, tcl, guile, ...), it may be a more practical enhancement,
> though.

Agreed. I just posted a patch series that gives you --pretty lua
support, though I haven't convinced myself it's all that exciting yet. I
think it would be nicer for grepping, where the conditionals read more
like regular code. Something like:

  git log --lua-filter='
    return
      author().name.match("Junio") &&
      note("p4").match("1234567")
  '

reads OK to me.

-Peff