Re: [PATCH 2/3] [GSOC] ref-filter: support %(contents) for blob, tree

ZheNing Hu <adlternative@gmail.com> writes:

I do not think you can duplicate the feature of %(header) with other existing placeholders. You may want to dump the headers of series of commits so that you can find if there is any commit with unusal header elements, but %(tree), %(parents), etc. would by definition be the known ones, so any combination of them will not be a substitute.

But nobody is asking for it right now, and your cat-file --batch does not need it right away.

What I wanted to say in the message you are responding to was *not* that you would want to add %(header) for completeness right now. But thinking beyond your immediate need (i.e. the "whole thing") and imagining how various pieces, including the ones that do not exist yet, would fit together, would help you to avoid designing the parts you immediately need in a way you would regret in the future.