Re: [PATCH 2/2] Add a 'source' decorator for commits

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 08:17:02AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> >   - Does it make sense to have this _in addition_ to --decorate (since
> >     for any commit with a --decorate field, it would likely be the same
> >     as --source)? Should it be a different type of decorate instead,
> >     like --decorate=source or --decorate=branch?
> 
> I think they are different. People who want --source generally have other 
> issues than people who want --decorate, and the two do actually work 
> together.

Sleeping on this and thinking about it some more, I think you are right
here, and all of the other complaints I had just go away.

I was thinking of it as "decorate commits with the likely branches they
were made on." But that's not what this is at all (though it happens to
come up with similar answers!). It's really about "show which ref, of
the refs which were requested to be shown, we started at to reach this
commit." Which is perhaps more limited, but obvoiusly is much faster to
compute.

And then the output of "git log --source HEAD" makes perfect sense, and
it makes sense not to worry about finding the "closest" ref. It is
really about annotating the traversal that you asked for.

So now my only complaint is the lack of documentation and tests. ;)

-Peff