Re: [RFD] Git glossary: 'branch' and 'head' description

[Shawn Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>]

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 19 May 2006, Daniel Barkalow wrote:
> > 
> > I guess I did forget that it sticks around. So you have to be doing 
> > something somewhat more complicated, like fetching the latest versions of 
> > multiple topic branches.
> 
> I actually don't think it's at all unlikely that I'd start using this.

Hey, if its useful.  :-) If its not then I'm doing something
wrong here...
 
[snip]
> I'm not entirely sure about the syntax, though. It ends up being pretty 
> command-line-unfriendly. The "gitk ORIG_HEAD.." thing is fairly easy to 
> type, but typing
> 
> 	gitk 'master@{2 hours ago}'..
> 
> on a Finnish keyboard (yeah, that's what I still use) is "interesting", 
> since all of '@', '{' and '}' are complex characters (AltGr + '2', AltGr + 
> '7' and AltGr + '0' respectively), and you have to remember the quoting.

Wow.  So what you are saying is writing any sort of C code must be
rather painful.  :-)

I received a suggestion of using ' (single quote) rather than {
as the quoting character.  I didn't make the quoting character
optional as I realized users were likely to forget they needed it
on date specs which contain ':', so I just made them required to
keep things consistent at all times.  Further {} won out over ''
as {} is also used with the ^ operator (e.g. v1.3.3^{tree}).

> Not that I see any obvious better syntax. Although allowing a shorthand 
> like "@2.hours.ago" for "current branch, at given date" might help a 
> bit, at least that wouldn't need quoting:
> 
> 	gitk @2.hours.ago..

The empty prefix for `HEAD` is simple.  The '.' part would need to
be fixed in approxidate() (and thus --since would also benefit).
Omitting the {} might be OK but see above...

-- 
Shawn.