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

On 5/8/07, Linus Torvalds [off-list ref] 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