On Tue, Feb 27, 2007 at 07:33:03PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote: > No, it really is English. At least grammatically. > > A "tree-ish" is "like a tree", exactly like "sheepish" is "like a sheep". > Nothing really git-specific about it, except for it certainly having > become common usage in a way that it may not be normally ;) Well, in the randomhouse web page you quoted: Our -ish is a suffix that forms adjectives from nouns or other adjectives. Some of the senses existed in Old English (then spelled -isc but pronounced the same way), such as 'of, being, or pertaining to', used to form adjectives indicating a national, ethnic, or religious origin (British, Jewish). it claims that the -ish suffix forms an _adjective_. But in the sense of git describe <committish> In the git world we are using "committish" (and in the documentation sometimes we use committish and treeish, and other times we use commit-ish and tree-ish) as a _noun_, and not an adjective. So I'm still going to take a bit of issue that it's grammatical English, and I still think that "tree_specifier" and "commit_specifier" would have been clearer. In any case, I note that in the git(7) man page, there is a formal definition of tree-ish, but not of commit-ish. Would this patch to Documentation/git.txt be correct? diff --git a/Documentation/git.txt b/Documentation/git.txt index 9a74747..ff693c3 100644 --- a/Documentation/git.txt +++ b/Documentation/git.txt @@ -241,6 +241,12 @@ Identifier Terminology operate on a <tree> object but automatically dereferences <commit> and <tag> objects that point at a <tree>. +<commit-ish>:: + Indicates a commit or tag object name. A + command that takes a <commit-ish> argument ultimately wants to + operate on a <commit> object but automatically dereferences + <tag> objects that point at a <commit>. + <type>:: Indicates that an object type is required. Currently one of: `blob`, `tree`, `commit`, or `tag`. - Ted - 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