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Mon, 19 Jan 2026 01:57:55 -0500 (EST) Received: by mail (OpenSMTPD) with ESMTPSA id a659050f (TLSv1.3:TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384:256:NO); Mon, 19 Jan 2026 06:57:54 +0000 (UTC) Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2026 07:57:51 +0100 From: Patrick Steinhardt To: Junio C Hamano Cc: Kristoffer Haugsbakk , Toon Claes , git@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 1/3] last-modified: rewrite error message when more than one revision given Message-ID: References: <20260114-toon-last-modified-tree-v2-0-ba3b1860898f@iotcl.com> <20260114-toon-last-modified-tree-v2-1-ba3b1860898f@iotcl.com> <87jyxjjejz.fsf@iotcl.com> Precedence: bulk X-Mailing-List: git@vger.kernel.org List-Id: List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit In-Reply-To: On Fri, Jan 16, 2026 at 09:16:03AM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote: > Patrick Steinhardt writes: > > >> Surprised that “revision” is a synonym for commit? Why is that? > > > > Because in my mind a revision can resolve to any object type. > > Yup, in the early days of this mailing list (like in 2005 ;-), the > word "revision" was used more or less interchangeably with "object > name", but "a revision" was much more likely to refer to a commit > than "an object name". It's probably still much more likely that a revision refers to a commit rather than anything else. > The name of the file that implements one of the more core-ish part of > the system is "revision.c" and talks about "revision traversal", which > is mostly about following parent pointers in commit DAG, but also > follows into trees starting from commits. This discussion makes me wonder whether we should maybe update how we define a "revision" in our glossary. One could take gitrevisions(1) as a starting point: A revision typically, but not necessarily, names a commit object. It uses what is called an extended SHA-1 syntax. We should probably get rid of "SHA-1" though. So maybe: A revision is used to refer to a specific object, typically a commit, using extended object name syntax. Refer to gitlink:gitrevisions[7] for more information. > > Also, it's confusing to conflate the way to name a commit with a commit > > itself. "HEAD~10" is a revision, but taken by itself it's not a commit. > > I do not know about this. If HEAD~10 does not resolve to anything, > it would not be a commit and it would not be a revision, either. I guess things are getting philosophical here :) I rather see it like a pointer: a pointer is still a pointer even if it doesn't point to anything. Patrick