Re: [Question] Can git cat-file have a type filtering option?

From: Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com>
Date: Apr 10, 2023, 23:20 UTC
Message-ID: <ZDSZs8LgZzDLf5m1@nand.local>
In-Reply-To: <20230410200141.GB104097@coredump.intra.peff.net>

On Mon, Apr 10, 2023 at 04:01:41PM -0400, Jeff King wrote:

> For that reason, and just for general flexibility, I think you are
> mostly better off piping cat-file through an external filter program
> (and then back to cat-file to get more data on each object).

Yeah, agreed. The convention of printing objects listed on the command-line regardless of whether they would pass through the object filter is confusing to me, too.

But using `rev-list --no-walk` to accomplish the same job for a filter as trivial as the type-level one feels overkill anyway, so I agree that just relying on `cat-file` to produce the list of objects, filtering it yourself, and then handing it back to `cat-file` is the easiest thing to do.

Thanks, Taylor