On Mon, Sep 26, 2016 at 5:00 AM, Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> This patch teaches get_short_sha1() to list the sha1s of the
> objects it found, along with a few bits of information that
> may help the user decide which one they meant.
This looks very good to me, but I wonder if it couldn't be even more aggressive.
In particular, the only hashes that most people ever use in short form
are commit hashes. Those are the ones you'd use in normal human
interactions to point to something happening.
So when the disambiguation notices that there is ambiguity, but there
is only _one_ commit, maybe it should just have an aggressive mode
that says "use that as if it wasn't ambiguous".
And then have an explicit command (or flag) to do disambiguation for
when you explicitly want it.
Rationale: you'd never care about short forms for tags. You'd just use
the tag name. And while blob ID's certainly show up in short form in
diff output (in the "index" line), very few people will use them. And
tree hashes are basically never seen outside of any plumbing commands
and then seldom in shortened form.
So I think it would make sense to default to a mode that just picks
the commit hash if there is only one such hash. Sure, some command
might want a "treeish", but a commit is still more likely than a tree
or a tag.
But regardless, this series looks like a good thing.
Linus