Re: [RFD] Git glossary: 'branch' and 'head' description

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: May 20, 2006, 02:06 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0605191853570.10823@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0605192116360.6713@iabervon.org>

On Fri, 19 May 2006, Daniel Barkalow wrote:

> 
> I guess I did forget that it sticks around. So you have to be doing 
> something somewhat more complicated, like fetching the latest versions of 
> multiple topic branches.

I actually don't think it's at all unlikely that I'd start using this.

I tend to work in "spurts", where I do one thing for a while, and then merge several pull requests in fairly short order. So while I use ORIG_HEAD a lot, I can certainly imagine myself using the "since 2 hours ago" format too.

I'm not entirely sure about the syntax, though. It ends up being pretty command-line-unfriendly. The "gitk ORIG_HEAD.." thing is fairly easy to type, but typing

	gitk 'master@{2 hours ago}'..

on a Finnish keyboard (yeah, that's what I still use) is "interesting", since all of '@', '{' and '}' are complex characters (AltGr + '2', AltGr + '7' and AltGr + '0' respectively), and you have to remember the quoting.

Not that I see any obvious better syntax. Although allowing a shorthand like "@2.hours.ago" for "current branch, at given date" might help a bit, at least that wouldn't need quoting:

	gitk @2.hours.ago..

			Linus