Re: GIT PULL] ext4 updates for 3.5

[Ted Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Fri, Jun 01, 2012 at 01:43:35PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 1, 2012 at 1:38 PM, Ted Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
> > One other thought.  One of the reasons why I used "dev" and not
> > "ext4_for_linus" in my git request-pull command line was because that
> > several months ago I had created a branch called ext4_for_linus, and I
> > hadn't gotten around to deleting it, so I figured I'd just use "dev"
> > instead, since it was non-ambiguous.
> 
> You can always just use "tags/xyzzy" to disambiguate..

Ah, I thought you always had to type the full "refs/tags/.."
specification.  I didn't realize it did substring matching.  Besides,
"dev" was much shorter and easier to type.  :-)

One of the things which is easy for a novice to miss is the "warning:
ext4_for_linus is ambiguous" message, though.  And I suspect many
novices don't know about the "git show-refs -a | grep ambiguous_tag"
trick to figure out where the ambiguity is coming from.  So if we are
going to give a warning, it might be good if we actually told the user
what were the other choices, and which choice git was going to choose.
Most of the time it seems to choose the right thing, but trusting
computer programs to choose the right answer from something ambiguous
via some hueristic always scares the bejesus out of me....

    	 	   	  	     	     - Ted