Re: [PATCH v4] Introduce %<branch> as shortcut to the tracked branch

From: Julian Phillips <julian@quantumfyre.co.uk>
Date: Mar 20, 2009, 20:28 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LNX.2.00.0903202022560.12211@reaper.quantumfyre.co.uk>
In-Reply-To: <20090320193650.GA26934@coredump.intra.peff.net>

On Fri, 20 Mar 2009, Jeff King wrote:

Show 24 quoted lines

> On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 11:02:33AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>
>> A na?ve question.
>>
>> Has nobody suggested to use a really illegal characters such as ':'
>> instead?  After all, we are not talking something that you can use in
>> refspecs but another way to spell branch names.
>
> But if this goes into dwim_ref, then won't it be usable for refspecs? Or
> even if it isn't, then imagine the user who doesn't know this and types
>
>  git push :foo
>
> unwittingly deleting the remote "foo".
>
> Yes, that is unlikely (since why would they push the tracking branch of
> foo?), but I don't think it makes sense to argue that it doesn't have
> confusing (and potentially dangerous) consequenses.
>
>> Alternatively, '~master' may have a nice connotation that means "where
>> master calls its home".
>
> I think that is quite clever and doesn't have any meaning for a revision
> specifier already. I like it.

I considered suggesting this earlier, but didn't as the behaviour is not consistent. If you have a user named master then you have to type '~master' (including quotes), if you don't you can type ~master, and you always have to type '~' instead of ~. I didn't particularly fancy typing all those quotes, and certainly not explaining the behaviour to people not overly familiar with unix shell behaviour.

-- 
Julian

  ---
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