[tig] Feeding specific revisions to tig

Hi there,

In order to track changes between my development branch and the stable branch that goes to production, I'm using git-cherry-pick and git-cherry to list the changesets available for merging.

Ideally I'd like to feed this list of commits to tig, so that I can watch the commit diff and summary easily and switch from one commit to another. But tig only behaves as a pager, and does not help for this.

To make it short I'd like to do something like this:

git-cherry origin/stable origin/trunk | sed -ne 's/^+ //p' | tig

And browse every available commit with tig.

Does it make sense?

Cheers,

On Wed, Jun 04, 2008 at 08:52:14PM +0200, Jean-Baptiste Quenot wrote:

I think there are two issues here, but both are solvable:

  1. You want to see _just_ these commits, but not the whole ancestry
     chain. In that case, you want to use --no-walk. E.g.:

       tig --no-walk commit1 commit2 ...

     Though it seems there are a few display artifacts. If I do

       tig --no-walk tig-0.1 tig-0.2

     I get the 2 commits I expect, but also two "extra" blank
     commits at the bottom.

  2. tig works like a pager when stdin is not a tty. You can work
     around this by using xargs to give the commits to it on the
     command line, and then redirect stdin from the tty.

       ... | xargs sh -c 'tig --no-walk "$@" </dev/tty'

     which is kind of a lot to type. It might be nice for "tig -T"
     to open /dev/tty unconditionally instead of looking at stdin,
     so you could just do:

       ... | xargs tig -T --no-walk

-Peff

2008/6/4 Jeff King <peff@peff.net>:

I confirm there are extra blank lines at the bottom. As many as real commit lines.

Thanks for the suggestion. However, my list of commits is too long, the shell errors out with "tig: command too long". I'd like to feed tig with a list of commits from stdin, or from a file.

Something like: ... | tig --no-walk -F -

Which means: take the list of revisions from specified file, or here - for stdin, a la grep.

Cheers,

On Wed, Jun 04, 2008 at 10:04:45PM +0200, Jean-Baptiste Quenot wrote:

Ah. Adding "-F" probably wouldn't be that much work, but tig spawns "git log" internally, so you would probably end up with the same problem there. Converting tig to use "git rev-list --stdin" would fix that, but is probably a bit of major surgery.

-Peff

Sorry for restarting this old thread ...

On Thu, Jun 5, 2008 at 01:08, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:

git-rev-list expects a commit as an argument while git-log does not. I have been gradually changing the option parsing code to move towards using git-rev-parse for splitting up arguments so it will be possible to support refreshing better and pass user arguments to the diff engine etc. When the code will get there it probably won't be that hard to switch to use git-rev-list.

I actually added something that let's you alter the command executed for each view. So here is another possibility that can be used:

function tignowalk ()
{
   tmp=$(mktemp) # or .git/tigfiles or similar
   # Safe stuff from "stdin" and run tig with custom rev-list command
   cat > "$tmp
   TIG_MAIN_CMD="git rev-list --pretty=raw --no-walk --stdin < $tmp"
tig < /dev/tty
   rm "$tmp"
}

And then:

   printf "tig-0.2\ntig-0.1" | tignowalk

On Wed, Jun 4, 2008 at 22:04, Jean-Baptiste Quenot <jbq@caraldi.com> wrote:

The problem is that --no-walk doesn't seem to play nice with the --boundary flag that tig add by default. When the user requests --no-walk boundary commits are probably not interesting. My fix below has more information. I don't know if having only the "commit" line show up is a bug in git. At least there are no tests to confirm this or not.

commit ad9f9954419b5d3f595580d5184db59a00711f92
Author: Jonas Fonseca <fonseca@diku.dk>
Date:   Tue Aug 5 23:40:21 2008 +0200

    Clean up incomplete commits from main view listed for --no-walk

    When --no-walk is given on the command line by the user it causes
    boundary commits to be output with just the commit line, i.e:

      > git rev-list --pretty=raw --boundary --no-walk HEAD
      commit 60e8ea56880fc2e42008075d516c356ef605bc60
      tree 5b76086e4deaf62d3f7baffc6f49840f61d4e79c
      parent 145194bdfc8bf0b58185bbe28bc0097ce429de4d
      author Jonas Fonseca <fonseca@diku.dk> 1217797175 +0200
      committer Jonas Fonseca <fonseca@diku.dk> 1217797402 +0200

          Remove the global opt_request variable

      commit -145194bdfc8bf0b58185bbe28bc0097ce429de4d

On Wed, Aug 06, 2008 at 01:06:51PM +0200, Jonas Fonseca wrote:

I am glad you got a chance to look at it. :)

Neat, if a bit hack-ish. :) You are missing a closing quotation mark after

  cat > "$tmp

and the line break between TIG_MAIN_CMD and tig is obviously problematic (presumably an artifact of the email, but it confused my cut and paste efforts for a minute). One other thing to note is that even though you try to handle a $tmp with whitespace in the cat and rm commands, I suspect it would fail when tig hands TIG_MAIN_CMD to the shell. That would require double-quoting.

So here is my cut-and-pastable version:

  tignowalk() {
    tmp=$(mktemp)
    cat >"$tmp"
    TIG_MAIN_CMD="git rev-list --pretty=raw --no-walk --stdin <$tmp" \
      tig </dev/tty
    rm "$tmp"
  }

The output looks great, though. Doing

  git show-ref --heads | cut -d' ' -f2 | tignowalk

is nice. :)

Sorry, I don't know if that is intentional or not.

-Peff

On Fri, Aug 8, 2008 at 23:19, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:

Yes, this way to "hook" into tig is a bit hackish and gives some problems with handling files. But then again, it is hidden away in env. variables, which seems very effective in not getting it too exposed. :)

Thanks for the fixed up version.

2008/8/10 Jonas Fonseca <jonas.fonseca@gmail.com>:

Restarting this old thread again. Starting from 0.13 the *tignowalk()* hack does not work anymore. What's the preferred way to feed specific revisions using stdin now?

Sorry for the slow reply ...

On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 16:55, Jean-Baptiste Quenot <jbq@caraldi.com> wrote:

I don't know if it is preferred, but it works. First add a git alias:

[alias]
        tignowalk-helper = !git rev-list --pretty=raw --no-walk --stdin<

Then modify tignowalk by replacing the line calling tig to say:

TIG_MAIN_CMD="git tignowalk-helper $tmp" tig </dev/tty

... and it should work. Maybe more git alias functionality can simplify the hack.

2009/4/27 Jonas Fonseca <jonas.fonseca@gmail.com>:

Works a treat, thanks!

I wonder how you managed to invent this trick though :-)

2009/4/27 Jonas Fonseca <jonas.fonseca@gmail.com>:

Restarting this thread again... it seems like every new version of tig breaks this usecase :-)

Any idea how to feed specific revisions to tig 0.18? The trick does not work anymore, as support for TIG_MAIN_CMD was dropped.