# --stdin option for 'git log' [was FFmpeg considering GIT]

1 messages from 2007-05-11 to 2007-05-11. Participants: Marco Costalba.
Thread: https://gitlist.dev/t/8083

## Marco Costalba, 2007-05-11 11:13

Subject: --stdin option for 'git log' [was FFmpeg considering GIT]
Message-ID: <e5bfff550705110413q28aef3d8k3aeb0d342eeb2016@mail.gmail.com>
URL: https://gitlist.dev/e/e5bfff550705110413q28aef3d8k3aeb0d342eeb2016%40mail.gmail.com

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On 5/8/07, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
>
> Well, we actually do have that. "git log" (or "git-rev-list") really does
> all the heavy lifting. The reason you can do things like "gitk --merge" is
> not because gitk itself has _any_ idea about anything, but because it just
> passes the arguments down to git-rev-list (and hopefully soon git log),
> which really does all the complex stuff.
>

To replace 'git rev-list' with 'git log' an important missing feature,
at least for me, is the support for '--stdin' option of 'git-rev-list'
that currently seems missing in 'git log'

I found this limit while trying to use 'git log' instead of 'git
rev-list'. The problem is that command line arguments could be very
long in some cases, typically when passing a list of sha's values (as
example all the branches sha). This happens of course when 'git log'
is run by script/applications not directly by the user.

Under Linux, command line arguments size limits are _normaly_ enough
(you could have problems for repository with hundreds of
tags/branches), but under *others* OS we are not so lucky.

So with '--stdin' you have an elegant solution to support any kind of
repository under any OS ignoring  the platform limit on command line
length.


 Marco

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