Re: [PATCH] git-cget: prints elements of C code in the git repository

[Steven Tweed <orthochronous@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 2:38 PM, Mike Ralphson <mike.ralphson@gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/3/24 Jeff King <peff@peff.net>:
> This kind of pipeline has the benefit that it can actually work on the
> *repository*, and not just the working copy (as per the posted
> script).

Speaking of wanting things to work with the actual repository , one
thing that I've been meaning to continue work on if I get the time is
basically a 'show me any commit diff's that involve string s' (ie, the
locations in which a change involving s occurs rather than just
'current file contains s (in exactly the same ways the previous
version did). I'm extremely unlikely to actually produce anything
based on that in the near future. But one thing that struck me that
might be reasonably useful is some way of filtering the "context" that
a string occurs in (is it in generic code context, in a string or in a
comment). These are things that tend to be reasonably parametrisable
by regular expressions (although escaping string delimiters within in
strings makes completely correct behaviour tricky), so if git-grep
itself were to be extended I'd prefer something that can be specified
per search in a more generally usable way than something very C
specific. Of course this is a quite difficult task as the actual diff
may not contain enough lines to distinguish, eg, that it occurs within
a longer comment. (As already disclaimed, I'm unlikely to actually get
around to doing any of this work).

cheers, dave tweed