Re: [PATCH 0/5] git check-ref-format --stdin --report-errors

From: Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu>
Date: Dec 19, 2016, 11:29 UTC
Message-ID: <561c0338-66cd-f806-7b3b-b422f98a1564@alum.mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <20161104191358.28812-1-ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>

On 11/04/2016 08:13 PM, Ian Jackson wrote:

Show 20 quoted lines

> I wanted to be able to syntax check lots of proposed refs quickly
> (please don't ask why - it's complicated!)
> 
> So I added a --stdin option to git-check-ref-format.  Also it has
> --report-errors now too so you can get some kind of useful error
> message if it complains.
> 
> It's still not really a good batch mode but it's good enough for my
> use case.  To improve it would involve a new command line option to
> offer a suitable stdout output format.
> 
> There are three small refactoring patches and the two patches with new
> options and corresponding docs.
> 
> Thanks for your attention.
> 
> FYI I am not likely to need this again in the near future: it's a
> one-off use case.  So my effort for rework is probably limited.  I
> thought I'd share what I'd done in what I hope is a useful form,
> anyway.

Thanks for your patches. I left some comments about the individual patches.

I don't know whether this feature will be popular, but it's not a lot of code to add it, so it would be OK with me.

Especially given that the output is not especially machine-readable, it might be more consistent with other commands to call the new feature `--verbose` rather than `--report-errors`.

If it is thought likely that scripts will want to leave a pipe open to this command and feed it one query at a time, then it would be helpful to flush stdout after each reference's result is written. If the opposite use case is common (mass processing of refnames), we could always add a `--buffer` option like the one that `git cat-file --batch` has.

Michael