Re: Questions about git-rev-parse

[Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Tue, Feb 27, 2007 at 06:40:47PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> You are lacking historical context that our porcelain-ish were

So while I'm asking questions, where did the "*-ish" terminology come
from, anyway?  For someone who is a relative newbie, terms like
tree-ish and commit-ish seems like some kind of strange, git jargon.
And this is the first time I've come across porcelian-ish.

I had the mental model (which I had intuited, since no git
documentation I could find had bothered to explain it) that -ish meant
something like specifier, so "tree-ish" meant tree specifier, so a
commit id could get dereferenced into a tree id, so it could be used
to specify a tree.

But that explanation doesn't explain "porcelain-ish".  

So what does -ish mean, really?  Where did it come from?  And if it
does add value to use this wierd bit of git jargon, can we document it
somewhere, preferably in a tutorial and main git man page?  It used in
too many places that it's probably not worth it to rip it out, but I
can tell you that for someone who is learning git from the ground up,
it would be easier if we used some term like <tree_specifier> instead
of <tree-ish>.  

Regards,

						- Ted