Hi, Mike Hommey wrote: > My thought is that a string like <helper>::<revision> could be used > wherever a committish is expected. That would call some helper > and request to resolve revision, and the helper would provide a git > commit as a response. I like this idea. > The reason for the <helper>:: prefix is that it matches the <helper>:: > prefix used for remote helpers. > > Now, there are a few caveats: > - <revision>, for e.g. svn, pretty much would depend on the remote. > OTOH, in mercurial, it doesn't. I think it would be fair for the > helper to have to deal with making what appears after :: relevant > to find the right revision, by possibly including a remote name. > - msys likes to completely fuck up command lines when they contain ::. > For remote helpers, the alternative that works is > <helper>://<host>/etc. Hm --- is there a bug already open about this (e.g. in the Git for Windows project or in msys) where I can read more? > Which leads me to think some "virtual" ref namespace could be a solution > to the problem. So instead of <helper>::, the prefix would be <helper>/. > For e.g. svn, svn/$remote/$rev would be a natural way to specify the > revision for a given remote. For mercurial, hg/$sha1. I see. My naive assumption would be that a string like r12345 would be the most natural way for a user to want to specify a Subversion revision, but you're right that those only have meaning scoped to a particular server. That makes the svn/ prefix more tolerable. > Potentially, this could be a sort of pluggable ref stores, which could > be used for extensions such as the currently discussed reftable. > > On the opposite end of the problem, I'm also thinking about git log > --decorate=<helper> displaying the mercurial revisions where branch > decorations would normally go. > > I have no patch to show for it. Those are ideas that I first want to > discuss before implementing anything. One additional thought: unlike refs, these are not necessarily enumerable (and I wouldn't expect "git show-ref" to show them) and they do not affect "git prune"'s reachability computation. So internally I don't think refs is the right concept to map these to. I think the right layer is revision syntax handling (revision.c). Thanks, Jonathan
