So I was looking at git-rev-parse trying to understand the man page, as
I was trying to understand how various commands can accept lists (or
ranges) of commits, and the man page raised a number of questions.
First of all, the DESCRIPTION section doesn't quite parse as English:
Many git porcelainish commands take mixture of flags (i.e. parameters
that begin with a dash -) and parameters meant for underlying
git-rev-list command they use internally and flags and parameters for
other commands they use as the downstream of git-rev-list.
But, as best as I can gather that it's a helper function meant to do
some basic options parsing for those git porcelain commands that expect
to take a set of revision ID's.
This raises some additional questions, though. If the goal of this
command is to parse out those options and arguments which are meant for
git-rev-list, why does it translate tag names to SHA id's:
% git-rev-parse v1.5.0..v1.5.0.1
dedb0faa48787839dbc47b7ca2507bda5924ec2c
^6db027ffe03210324939b3dd655c4223ca023b45
After all, git-rev-list can just as easily accept:
git-rev-list dedb0faa48787839dbc47b7ca2507bda5924ec2c \
^6db027ffe03210324939b3dd655c4223ca023b45
as
git-rev-list v1.5.0..v1.5.0.1
Also, there are a number of options in git-rev-list which make it appear
to be a general dumping ground of miscellaneous options.
For example, it's not clear what
git-rev-parse --show-prefix
and
git-rev-parse --show-cdup
have to do with the description of git-rev-parse as described in the
DESCRIPTION section. It seems to be completely miscellaneous extras
that were tacked on. Or am I missing something?
Finally, it seems rather unfortunate that certain bits of functionality
such as --since and --until were hidden into git-rev-parse, since it
means that some commands which are implemented as shell scripts are more
likely to use git-rev-parse, and will therefore support --since and
--until, where as other commands which are implemented as built-in's,
such as git-log, don't accept --since and --until.
So I'm wondering if I'm missing something about historical context,
since from looking at git-rev-parse, it looks like not a lot of thought
went into its design, and it has a bunch of stuff that grew via
accretion; or maybe I'm not understanding why it was designed the way it
was?
Regards,
- Ted
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