From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from lindbergh.monkeyblade.net (lindbergh.monkeyblade.net [23.128.96.19]) (using TLSv1.2 with cipher ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 (256/256 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by smtp.subspace.kernel.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id D0B50111D for ; Wed, 8 Nov 2023 03:14:08 +0000 (UTC) Authentication-Results: smtp.subspace.kernel.org; dkim=pass (1024-bit key) header.d=pobox.com header.i=@pobox.com header.b="chwkANaB" Received: from pb-smtp21.pobox.com (pb-smtp21.pobox.com [173.228.157.53]) by lindbergh.monkeyblade.net (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 6D4B910F6 for ; Tue, 7 Nov 2023 19:14:08 -0800 (PST) Received: from pb-smtp21.pobox.com (unknown [127.0.0.1]) by pb-smtp21.pobox.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id E1F313530D; Tue, 7 Nov 2023 22:14:07 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from junio@pobox.com) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed; d=pobox.com; h=from:to:cc :subject:in-reply-to:references:date:message-id:mime-version :content-type; s=sasl; bh=krUTeaxotdMXmgUoYuRobYGSdp8rIa+xjt32LY 1euvg=; b=chwkANaBRfAHm2TNc5eko87Mokysi4gTcbWr3rJFNpt6/sSrUTj8oy 3ZpRKZ6pfYhuCmc0HVdqgGqBR5r9MjW/mm/m1y4AlPcm0bMYJ/pRcEJBwy5t5sUi nK1EtgAnf71m0MVov1gl6BvEmXG1RRig3Cjwz5gQp1XKq0YLXhQh4= Received: from pb-smtp21.sea.icgroup.com (unknown [127.0.0.1]) by pb-smtp21.pobox.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id DA0B43530C; Tue, 7 Nov 2023 22:14:07 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from junio@pobox.com) Received: from pobox.com (unknown [34.125.67.28]) (using TLSv1.2 with cipher ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 (256/256 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by pb-smtp21.pobox.com (Postfix) with ESMTPSA id 7766A3530B; Tue, 7 Nov 2023 22:14:04 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from junio@pobox.com) From: Junio C Hamano To: Victoria Dye Cc: Patrick Steinhardt , Victoria Dye via GitGitGadget , git@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [PATCH 8/9] for-each-ref: add option to fully dereference tags In-Reply-To: (Victoria Dye's message of "Tue, 7 Nov 2023 17:13:52 -0800") References: <352b5c42ac39d5d2646a1b6d47d6d707637db539.1699320362.git.gitgitgadget@gmail.com> Date: Wed, 08 Nov 2023 12:14:02 +0900 Message-ID: User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Precedence: bulk X-Mailing-List: git@vger.kernel.org List-Id: List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain X-Pobox-Relay-ID: DF289BBE-7DE4-11EE-812C-A19503B9AAD1-77302942!pb-smtp21.pobox.com Victoria Dye writes: > I think `^{}fieldname` would be a good candidate, but it's *extremely* Gaah. Why? fieldname^{} I may understand, but in the prefix form? In any case, has anybody considered that we may be better off to declare that "*field" peeling a tag only once is a longstanding bug? IOW, can we not add "fully peel" command line option or a new syntax and instead just "fix" the bug to fully peel when "*field" is asked for? An application that cares about handling a chain of annotatetd tags would want to be able to say "this is the outermost tag's information; one level down, the tag was signed by this person; another level down, the tag was signed by this person, etc." which would mean either * we have a syntax that shows the information from all levels (e.g., "**taggername" may say "Victoria\nPatrick\nGitster") * we have a syntax that allows to specify how many levels to peel, (e.g., "*0*taggername" may be the same as "taggername", "*1*taggername" may be the same as "*taggername") plus some programming construct like variables and loops. but the repertoire being proposed that consists only of "peel only once" and "peel all levels" is way too insufficient. Note that I do not advocate for allowing inspection of each levels separately. Quite the contrary. I would say that --format=<> placeholder should not be a programming language to satisify such a niche need. And my conclusion from that stance is "peel once" plus "peel all" are already one level too many, and "peel once" was a very flawed implementation from day one, when 9f613ddd (Add git-for-each-ref: helper for language bindings, 2006-09-15) introduced it.