Re: [RFD} Use regex's in :/ revision naming machinery

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Apr 6, 2010, 01:51 UTC
Message-ID: <7vr5mtl55q.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.2.00.1004051551180.21411@i5.linux-foundation.org>

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> writes:

Show 12 quoted lines

> So this is very much debatable, but I'm including a patch for the 
> discussion to start.
>
> I never use ':/', and part of it is that it's so horribly cumbersome. I'd 
> _like_ to use it to do things like 
>
> 	gitk :/slabh..
>
> which would (right now) show what happened since I merged the 'slabh' 
> branch. But that doesn't work, I would need to write it as
>
> 	gitk :/"Merge branch 'slabh'"..

A related but a larger issue is that I suspect this "two-dot" would not work, as the syntax looks for "Merge branch 'slabh'.." (two-dot taken literally).

I also happen to think that the current ':/' is more or less useless because you cannot tell it to start digging from only these branches, and it becomes dice-throwing which commit it would find.

Compared to these, I don't think anybody has much against using regex. I personally am all for it, but I am not sure how much regex makes it more useful.