Re: Suggestion: make --left-right work with --merge

On Fri, 29 Feb 2008, Paul Mackerras wrote:

Well, it does, except for --merge, which is perhaps a special case.

Well, clearly --merge is a special case, but it probably really shouldn't 
be.

If you want to parse revisions, then --merge should do that. But --merge 
is really special in that it expands into *both* a revision range *and* a 
set of files, so it doesn't really work wonderfully well for the trivial 
kind of parsing that git-rev-parse does.

So we certainly *could* just add "--merge" to the list of magic flags that 
is known about by is_rev_argument(), since that's a trivial one-liner. But 
that's really only ok for the case where we are supposed to output both 
revisions *and* flags, and even then it should also suppress the default 
HEAD generation (although it won't actually hurt, since the revision 
output from --merge will include HEAD in teh "HEAD...MERGE_HEAD" logic 
anyway, so with --default always being HEAD in practice..)

So yeah, I think git-rev-list has trouble handling --merge sanely the way 
it is currently written.

		Linus