Re: [PATCH] gitk: add support for -G'regex' pickaxe variant

From: Martin Langhoff <martin.langhoff@gmail.com>
Date: May 13, 2013, 16:22 UTC
Message-ID: <CACPiFCKkzSCaSfqExZggFHBAmcPBTYYhyauOa2h1dXiYqKZMxA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20130511094119.GA6196@iris.ozlabs.ibm.com>

On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 5:41 AM, Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org> wrote:

Show 15 quoted lines

> On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 11:13:22PM -0700, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
>> Paul Mackerras wrote:
>>
>> > I thought I had replied to this patch; maybe I only thought about it.
>> >
>> > Given that we already have a selector to choose between exact and
>> > regexp matching, it seems more natural to use that rather than add a
>> > new selector entry.  Arguably the "IgnCase" option should be disabled
>> > when "adding/removing string" is selected.
>>
>> Thanks.  I think I disagree: "log -G" and "log -S" are different
>> operations, not variations on the same one.
>
> OK, fair enough, and I see there is in fact a --pickaxe-regex we
> could use.

And to be honest, log -G is so much more useful that I don't care a s***t for log -S.

Essentially, to use log -S you need to know that the string the change you are looking for changed all together. That's a high threshold of knowledge to meet before you find something; you essentially have to know what you are looking for pretty well!

In other words: You find a suspicious-looking line of code and you ask "how did this horrid code come to be?", and the more horrendous the code is, the more likely it is to be the accretion of a several commits. In that case, which to me is the common case, log -S ain't your friend at all.

cheers,