Re: [RFD} Use regex's in :/ revision naming machinery

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Apr 6, 2010, 02:15 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.2.00.1004051911190.11318@i5.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <7vr5mtl55q.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Mon, 5 Apr 2010, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> 
> A related but a larger issue is that I suspect this "two-dot" would not
> work, as the syntax looks for "Merge branch 'slabh'.." (two-dot taken
> literally).

That part works. We do the dot-dot handling first. But:

> I also happen to think that the current ':/' is more or less useless
> because you cannot tell it to start digging from only these branches, and
> it becomes dice-throwing which commit it would find.

I do agree that :/ would be much better if it just started from HEAD, rather than from any branch. It doesn't matter too much for me, but that's because for the kernel I tend to have just one branch (with random occasional topic-branches, but since I do merging rather than real development, that's the rare case)

> Compared to these, I don't think anybody has much against using regex.  I
> personally am all for it, but I am not sure how much regex makes it more
> useful.

I have to admit that I never use it. The reason I did that silly patch is that today I thought that I _could_ use it, but then my naive

	gitk :/slabh..

thing didn't work, and I wondered why.

Would I actually use it more regularly if it was a regex? And if it had saner semantics wrt branches? I dunno. Maybe my try at using it today was the last time I'd ever try to use it again, regardless.

			Linus