On Dec 10, 2010, at 3:08 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Kevin Ballard <kevin@xxxxxx> writes:
>
>> On Dec 10, 2010, at 11:03 AM, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
>>
>>> - What is the intended use for this family of modifiers? I sort
>>> of understand ^{:i/... } for people that forget what case they
>>> have used, but why the :nth and others?
>>
>> In my particular case, I was glancing through the logs, and I wanted to grab
>> the second branch that someone else had made that was merged into pu. I would
>> have loved to be able to run something like
>>
>> git merge origin/pu^{:nth(2)/nd/}
>>
>> While we're speaking of modifiers, could we use one that says "only search
>> the first parent hierarchy", e.g. something equivalent to git log's --first-parent
>> flag?
>
> Both feels like a very made-up example to me.
And yet the example I gave is pretty much precisely what prompted me to start
this discussion in the first place.
> The reason you can so sure that you can to give nth(2) not nth(3) nor
> nth(1) and run "merge" in the example is probably because you looked at
> the output from "git log --first-parent --oneline origin..origin/pu", no?
>
> d414638 Merge branch 'rj/msvc-fix' into pu
> e5f5e49 Merge branch 'ak/describe-exact' into pu
> 439932d Merge branch 'jn/svn-fe' into pu
> d60b33b Merge branch 'pd/bash-4-completion' into pu
> 09cbbde Merge branch 'tf/commit-list-prefix' into pu
> 1b2ea00 Merge branch 'mg/cvsimport' into pu
> c6d41f4 Merge branch 'nd/maint-relative' into pu
> 81f395e Merge branch 'ab/i18n' into pu
> 9f5471f Merge branch 'nd/setup' into pu
> 06f74a4 Merge branch 'yd/dir-rename' into pu
> d8a2ec8 Merge branch 'en/object-list-with-pathspec' into pu
>
> After looking at this output, do you really want to say ":nth(2)/nd/"
> instead of 9f5471f?
Yep. Doing the latter either requires me to swap over to my mouse, copy the sha1,
and paste in, or requires me to peer at the sha1 and re-type enough characters.
It's a lot easier to just glance at that list, realize the 2nd one is the one I
want, and type `git merge :^{nth(2)/nd/}`. It may not necessarily be faster than
retyping the sha1, but it's a lot less prone to transcription errors.
-Kevin Ballard--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html