From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Thu, 21 Apr 2011 17:40:27 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH/RFC 0/3] teaching log's --glob=<glob> and friends to git shortlog
Message-ID: <7vtydry038.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20110421102241.GA16185@elie>

Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:

> 	git rev-list ^HEAD --no-walk commit1 commit2 ...

That should be "git rev-list --no-walk ^HEAD commit1 commit2 ..." from the
syntactical point of view to begin with, but more importantly, what does
it mean to ask excluding commits reachable from HEAD without walking?

As ^HEAD is inherently about walking the history to paint the part of DAG
that are not interesting because the nodes in there are reachable from
there, the request that command line tries to make does not make much
sense.

As I said in

 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/170457/focus=170629

the "--no-walk" hack happens to work by accident, and we would need to
rethink the way it operates and revamp it.