Re: [PATCH] grep --no-index: allow use of "git grep" outside a git repository

On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 10:30:19PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

Hmm. I like the new behavior. The implementation feels a little
hack-ish, like we should really be supporting full-on:

  git log --author=me --and --grep=foo

That gets a little weird, though. We already have "--not" for ref
limiting, so clearly there is some conflict ...

That is fundamentally wrong.

Remember, "grep" works on two levels: a line matches or does not match the
given set of patterns (rather, the expression given), and matched lines
are shown.  A file as a whole is considered to have matched if one or more
lines produced a match, or under the --all-match option, only when all of
the top-level ORed terms in the expression have fired for some lines in
it.

Fundamentally wrong for the way "log --grep" is currently implemented
perhaps, but I don't see anything wrong with considering each commit as
a single "record", just as regular grep considers each line to be a
record. That is a much more useful distinction for log traversal than
lines, which are useless from the user's perspective. If searching for
two terms, I care about whether they are in the same commit message, but
I don't care at all about line breaks.

Yes, I know that internally --author is really about line-matching the
commit headers, but that is an implementation detail. The mental model
we should present to the user is record-matching based on specific
fields like author, committer, or body text.

-Peff