On Fri, Feb 4, 2022 at 4:42 PM John Cai [off-list ref] wrote:

On 4 Feb 2022, at 1:45, Eric Sunshine wrote:

quoted

The `info` and `contents` commands neglect to do any sort of
validation of their arguments, thus any and all bogus invocations are
accepted. Thus:

    info
    info <arg1> <arg2>
    info <non-oid>

are all accepted as valid invocations, misleadingly producing "<foo>
missing" messages, rather than erroring out as they should. The "<oid>
missing" message should be reserved for the case when the lone
argument to `info` or `contents` is something which looks like a
legitimate OID.

So actually the argument to info and contents doesn't have to be an OID but an object name that
eventually gets passed to get_oid_with_context() to resolve to an actual oid. This is the
same behavior as git cat-file --batch and --batch-check, neither of which throws an error. My
goal was to maintain this behavior in --batch-command.

Okay, that makes sense. I was misled by the commit message talking
about "<sha1>" in its examples, and didn't do my due diligence by
digging more deeply into the existing documentation and code.