Re: multiple-commit cherry-pick?

On Fri, 14 Nov 2008, Chris Frey wrote:

It would be better to just extend the SHA-1 arithmetic. We could do it, no problem. It's just a SMOP.

For example, right now the arithmetic is entirely "flat", with no precedence, no nesting, nothing but a single level of set operations. We could extend it to be hierarchical.

So we _could_ do something like

	git log {a..b} {c..d ^e}

and just declare that { $args } is a self-contained "subset", and effectively becomes the same thing as "$(git rev-list $args)" but with magic no-walking semantics (ie all walking is done only _within_ the { }, not between different groups.

You literally _can_ do it right now that way:

	git log --no-walk $(git rev-list HEAD~5..HEAD~3) $(git rev-list HEAD~1..)

actually works, but that will hit argument size limits on many platforms really quickly.

So we could make a '{ }' in the argument space basically do a SHA1 expansion of the range inside, and imply --no-walk. It's _not_ entirely trivial, because we'd need to handle the fact that object flags are sticky, and clear them in between invocations of multiple ranges, but it's not _fundmanetally_ difficult. It's just that somebody would need to do it.

		Linus