Re: Questions about git-rev-parse

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Feb 28, 2007, 02:40 UTC
Message-ID: <7vvehn2eds.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <E1HMETh-0004BO-Lw@candygram.thunk.org>

"Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu> writes:

Show 5 quoted lines

> So I'm wondering if I'm missing something about historical context,
> since from looking at git-rev-parse, it looks like not a lot of thought
> went into its design, and it has a bunch of stuff that grew via
> accretion; or maybe I'm not understanding why it was designed the way it
> was?

You are lacking historical context that our porcelain-ish were all Bourne shell scripts. If you check out an old version (say v0.99), it would be apparent why translating symbolic names to object names and canonicalizing a..b to b ^a were useful to help them.

These days, "log" family got sufficiently smart that there are not many reasons to write shell pipeline that has rev-list on the upstream with diff-tree --stdin on the downstream anymore, and rev-parse outlived its original purpose of sifting between rev-list args/flags and others.