Re: [PATCH] revision.c: drop missing objects from cmdline

Matthew DeVore <matvore@google.com> writes:

"The code is not prepared to have cmdline.rev[].item that is NULL" is something everybody would understand and agree with, but that does not automatically lead to "so ignoring or rejecting and dying is OK", though. The cmdline thing is used for the commands to learn the end-user intent that cannot be learned by the resulting objects in the object array (e.g. the user may have said 'master' but the pending[] (and later revs.commits) would only have the object names, and some callers would want to know if it was a branch name, a refname refs/heads/master, or the hexadecimal object name), so unless absolutely needed, I'm hesitant to take a change that loses information (e.g. the user named this object that is not locally available, we cannot afford to add it to the pending[] and add it to revs.commits to traverse from there, but we still want to know what object was given by the user).

A "promisor" is a remote repository. It promises certain objects that you do not have are later retrievable from it. The way you can see if the promisor promised to later give you an object is to see if that missing object is reachable from an object in a packfile the promisor gave you earlier.

"The given object" is never a "promisor", so I am not sure what the above wants to say. Is

    When an object is given on the command line and if it is missing
    from the local repository, add_rev_cmdline() receives NULL in
    its "item" parameter.

what you meant? Is that the _only_ case in which "item" could be NULL, or is it also true for any missing object due to repository corruption?