Re: [RFC] Using gitrevisions :/search style with other operators

On Nov 9, 2010, at 4:18 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Yann Dirson [off-list ref] writes:

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Syntax like origin/pu^{/Merge 'kb/blame-author-email'}2 would be

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Another idea: origin/pu^{:2/Merge 'kb/blame-author-email'}

What are these "2"s?

You need to question how you figured out the commit you want is the second
one reachable (in whatever traversal order) from something in the first
place.  Didn't you use "git log --oneline" or something to find that out?
At that point, you have the object name already, so I doubt such a
"counting" feature is of much practical use.

The particular case that prompted this for me was I knew I had created two
commits called "WIP", scheduled for renaming later, and I wanted to quickly
look at the contents of the first one. I would have loved to be able to
type something like `git show :/WIP/2`. I suppose this situation may be rare
enough not to bother supporting it in the new syntax. With the new syntax
it will be possible to do something like `git show HEAD^{:/WIP}^^{:/WIP}`, but
that looks awfully awkward.

Another thing to consider - the current :/foo syntax searches for the newest
commit reachable from any ref. Using the ^{} syntax will require specifying
a ref first. I'm not sure this is a problem though, as I'm not really sure why
:/foo searches from all refs to begin with.

-Kevin Ballard