Re: Another use of "@"?

From: Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com>
Date: May 4, 2013, 12:44 UTC
Message-ID: <CALkWK0=qdGcbQDz2VomhOcy7AybXj5jkxzS53jFGyjdZ9+6juQ@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CACsJy8AcWV8hmbhG27dw+GdnZf8NnQEctYmowqd3sSzOOHf+xg@mail.gmail.com>

[joining the discussion late; was travelling]

Duy Nguyen wrote:

> git co long-branch-name
> git diff A/@
> git reset --hard A/@

In this form, this looks highly inconsistent. You have to decide if you want @ to resolve to the current branch name or HEAD. Our current @-proposal makes @@{1} display the reflog for HEAD for instance. The other problem is that we resolve things like @{-1} to full refs like refs/heads/master. Making a A/@{-1} work makes little or no sense, because that refs/heads needs to be changed to refs/remotes in the first place. What about refs/decapitated/@{-1}? Should we support it?

I tend to agree with Junio here: @{u} is the way forward. We need to define useful reduced consistent semantics; while inventing a mini-language to do all kinds of revision manipulations may be a fun theoretical exercise, it's too much effort for too little gain. We have to learn to work within the limitations of what we've invented so far.

On Matthieu's note, I have a comment: symbolic refs are an absolute dead end. We didn't think of it from the start, and it's too late now. Do NOT go there: from my investigation, I believe that hooking up everything to the revision parser is the way forward.