Re: Extending "extended SHA1" syntax to traverse through gitlinks?

From: Jakub Narębski <jnareb@gmail.com>
Date: Aug 21, 2016, 13:46 UTC
Message-ID: <9bad3d13-3257-2077-a734-f985c375b8d3@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20160820225013.l7ynru7hzcmrzff7@x>

W dniu 21.08.2016 o 00:50, Josh Triplett pisze:

Show 12 quoted lines

> Currently, if you have a branch "somebranch" that contains a gitlink
> "somecommit", you can write "somebranch:somecommit" to refer to the
> commit, just like a tree or blob.  ("man git-rev-parse" defines this
> syntax in the "SPECIFYING REVISIONS" section.)  You can use this
> anywhere you can use a committish, including "git show
> somebranch:somecommit", "git log somebranch:somecommit..anotherbranch",
> or even "git format-patch -1 somebranch:somecommit".
> 
> However, you cannot traverse *through* the gitlink to look at files
> inside its own tree, or to look at other commits relative to that
> commit.  For instance, "somebranch:somecommit:somefile" and
> "somebranch:somecommit~3" do not work.

Note that there is the same problem traversing through trees: while 'git cat-file -p HEAD:subdir/file' works, the 'HEAD:subdir:file' doesn't:

  $ git cat-file -p HEAD:subdir:file
  fatal: Not a valid object name HEAD:subdir:file

Though you can do resolve step manually

  $ git cat-file -p $(git rev-parse HEAD:subdir):file

This works.

> 
> I'd love to have a syntax that allows traversing through the gitlink to
> other files or commits.  Ideally, I'd suggest the syntax above, as a
> natural extension of the existing extended syntax.

And with the above manual resolving, you can see the problem with implementing it: the git-cat-file (in submodule) and git-rev-parse (in supermodule) are across repository boundary.

Also the problem with proposed syntax is that is not very visible. But perhaps it is all right. Maybe :/ as separator would be better, or using parentheses or braces?

Show 6 quoted lines

> (That syntax would potentially introduce ambiguity if you had a file
> named "somecommit:somefile" or "somecommit~3".  That doesn't seem like a
> problem, though; the existing syntax already doesn't support accessing a
> file named "x..y" or "x...y", so scripts already can't expect to access
> arbitrary filenames with that syntax without some kind of quoting, which
> we also don't have.)

Errr... what?

  $ echo A..B >A..B
  $ git add A..B
  $ git commit -m 'A..B added'
  [master 2d69af9] A..B added
   1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
   create mode 100644 A..B
  $ git show HEAD:A..B
  A..B

> 
> Does this seem reasonable?  Would a patch introducing such syntax
> (including documentation and tests) be acceptable?

-- 
Jakub Narębski