Re: Support of '^' as alias for 'HEAD^'

From: Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) <zeeshanak@gnome.org>
Date: Jul 14, 2012, 22:24 UTC
Message-ID: <CAAa3hFMNf_wA22ngypSu379jr31r3L3yAjTkvDUd_L-mVwPJkA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7vmx32590u.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Sun, Jul 15, 2012 at 12:26 AM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 15 quoted lines

> "Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)" <zeeshanak@gnome.org> writes:
>
>> What about '^' and '^^' that I suggested?
>>
>>>> While I see your "~<N>" much distasteful compared to "^", you still
>>>
>>> s/dist/less dist/; sorry ;-)
>>
>> Why?
>
> That "^^" is the most important reason why your "^ is the same as
> HEAD^" is flawed, and goes against my taste.
>
> Think what "log ^^ origin" would mean.  Is it "log ^HEAD^ origin"?
> Is it "log HEAD^^ origin"?  They mean totally different things.

Sorry for my ignorance here but what does ^ *before* HEAD even mean? I tried playing with different combinations of ^ and HEAD here (e.g ^HEAD^, ^HEAD^^, ^HEAD^^^) with both log and show commands but git just silently returns on them. Is this ^ before HEAD actually used cause I have never seen/heard of that before. Google isn't able to help either.

> Compared to that, at least ~<n> does not have such ambiguity within
> the context of Git (having to quote is an ambiguity within the
> context of using Git with shells that support dirstacks in their
> tilde expansion).

Don't know whats dirstacks support either but that I guess just means that bash (the shell I have always used) doesn't do that.

-- 
Regards,

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)
FSF member#5124