Re: Supporting "-v" option for git-log

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 02:28:12PM +0300, Elazar Leibovich wrote:

> On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 2:21 PM, Tim Mazid <timmazid@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Well, personally, I've never used the --grep option. I pipe it through
> > grep, where I can supply options such as -v.
> 
> But then you must use single-line commits output. Which is
> inconvenient if you want to read all the commit message.

You can use perl to consider records larger than a single line, like:

  git log -z | perl -ln0e 'print unless /your pattern/'

But of course that is somewhat inconvenient to type, and is somewhat
slower than the internal grep.

> Now that I think of it, we already have the '--not' option for
> revision specifiers. Why won't we use it for grep patterns? That way
> -v will not be overloaded (it usually means verbose). For example
> 
>     git log --all --not --grep A --grep B

The problem is that "--not" already has a meaning, and the scope of that
meaning is different than what you propose. That is, in this command:

  git log a --not b c

The "--not" applies to both "b" and "c". So you are changing the meaning
of the existing:

  git log a --not --grep b c

(which now means "grep for b, but do not include commits in c"). And
even if we wanted to do that, there is a parsing ambiguity. Does the
"--not" apply _just_ to the grep, or does it also include "not c"?

Which is a shame, because we already have all of the code for "--and",
"--or", and "--not" in git-grep. It is just a syntactic conflict. I
think you could get away with "--grep-and", "--grep-or", and
"--grep-not". They are obviously less nice to type, but there would be
not conflict.

-Peff