Re: [PATCH 0/2] [RFD] Using gitrevisions :/search style with other operators

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 01:21:15PM -0800, Kevin Ballard wrote:

> On Dec 10, 2010, at 11:03 AM, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
> 
> > - What is the intended use for this family of modifiers?  I sort
> >   of understand ^{:i/... } for people that forget what case they
> >   have used, but why the :nth and others?
> 
> In my particular case, I was glancing through the logs, and I wanted to grab
> the second branch that someone else had made that was merged into pu. I would
> have loved to be able to run something like
> 
>   git merge origin/pu^{:nth(2)/nd/}
> 
> While we're speaking of modifiers, could we use one that says "only search
> the first parent hierarchy", e.g. something equivalent to git log's --first-parent
> flag?

As neat as this modifier syntax is getting, are we perhaps just
recreating the wheel?

How about:

  git merge `git rev-list -2 --grep=nd/ origin/pu | tail -1`

for the nth one, and:

  git merge `git rev-list --first-parent -1 --grep=nd/ origin/pu`

for a first parent search (I will leave combining them as an exercise to
the reader).

It's not that I'm opposed to a handy ref-specifying syntax. I just
wonder if it is really worth building in all of these obscure scenarios.

-Peff