Re: Questions about git-rev-parse

[Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>]

"Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu> writes:

> So I'm wondering if I'm missing something about historical context,
> since from looking at git-rev-parse, it looks like not a lot of thought
> went into its design, and it has a bunch of stuff that grew via
> accretion; or maybe I'm not understanding why it was designed the way it
> was?

You are lacking historical context that our porcelain-ish were
all Bourne shell scripts.  If you check out an old version (say
v0.99), it would be apparent why translating symbolic names to
object names and canonicalizing a..b to b ^a were useful to help
them.

These days, "log" family got sufficiently smart that there are
not many reasons to write shell pipeline that has rev-list on
the upstream with diff-tree --stdin on the downstream anymore,
and rev-parse outlived its original purpose of sifting between
rev-list args/flags and others.