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

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Kevin Ballard <kevin@sb.org> writes:

> There is one operator that doesn't allow this at all, and that's the commit
> message search (e.g. :/foo). Every character after the :/ is taken to be
> part of the regular expression. This is rather unfortunate as it prevents me
> from doing something like :/foo^ to refer to the parent of the matching commit.
>
> Does anybody have any opinions on changing this operator?

If you mean to change what ":/Merge branch 'kb/blame-author-email'" means,
and make my scripts suddenly start breaking, I would be moderately unhappy.

It is fine if we can enhance the extended SHA-1 vocabulary by introducing
a syntax that used to be illegal, hence there is no chance somebody was
using it for other purposes.

I wonder if we can introduce something like ':( ... )' to group things.
E.g.

    $ git log 'HEAD..:( :/Merge branch 'kb/blame-author-email' )^2'

I haven't visited the particular codepath for some time, so I don't know
offhand how involved the change would be, though.