Re: [PATCH 5/5] describe: teach describe negative pattern matches

On Thu, Jan 12, 2017 at 5:45 AM, Johannes Sixt [off-list ref] wrote:

Am 12.01.2017 um 01:17 schrieb Jacob Keller:

quoted

From: Jacob Keller <redacted>

Teach git-describe the `--discard` option which will allow specifying
a glob pattern of tags to ignore. This can be combined with the
`--match` patterns to enable more flexibility in determining which tags
to consider.

For example, suppose you wish to find the first official release tag
that contains a certain commit. If we assume that official release tags
are of the form "v*" and pre-release candidates include "*rc*" in their
name, we can now find the first tag that introduces commit abcdef via:

  git describe --contains --match="v*" --discard="*rc*"

I have a few dozen topic branches, many of them are work in progress and
named wip/something. To see the completed branches, I routinely say

    gitk --exclude=wip/* --branches

these days.

It would be great if you could provide the same user interface here. The
example in the commit message would then look like this:

   git describe --contains --exclude="*rc*" --match="v*"

(I'm not saying that you should add --branches, but that you should prefer
--exclude over --discard. Also, the order of --exclude and --match would be
important.)

I think that --exclude makes sense, but the current implementation
does not differentiate ordering, since both are merely accumulated
into string_lists and then matched together. I'm not sure how order
would impact things here? In the current implementation, if something
is excluded and matched, it will be excluded. That is, exclusion
patterns take precedence over match patterns. I think this makes the
most sense semantically.

Thanks,
Jake

-- Hannes