From: Felipe Contreras Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2009 23:23:01 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/2] format-patch: fix dashdash usage Message-ID: <94a0d4530911261523q25147f12h2e6c9e4fe4f6b12b@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <7v7htc3mqo.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org> On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 1:11 AM, Junio C Hamano wrote: > Is it clearer what I meant?  More importantly, did I get the details > right? Yeah, I guess so. > Hmm, I have not seen a clear "yes, because..." yet. I'll repeat: Not everyone has clean branches only with pertinent patches. That's why revision filtering options make sense. > For one thing, Documentation/git-format-patch.txt does not even hint that > you can give pathspecs.  builtin_format_patch_usage[] doesn't, either.  As > I wrote the initial version of format-patch I can say with some authority > that use with pathspecs were never meant to be supported---if it works, it > works by accident, giving long enough rope to users to potentially cause > themselves harm. > > I am inclined to think that we shouldn't encourage use of pathspecs (just > like we never encouraged use of options like --name-only that never makes > sense in the context of the command) but I am undecided if we also should > forbid the use of pathspecs (just like we did for --name-only recently). How about 'git format-patch --full-diff'? Isn't that a valid way to filter patches just like --author, --grep, and so on? -- Felipe Contreras