On Fri, Aug 18, 2017 at 03:06:37PM -0700, Jonathan Nieder wrote: > 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? It's entirely an msys problem. Msys has weird rules to translate between unix paths and windows paths on the command line, and botches everything as a consequence. That's by "design". http://www.mingw.org/wiki/Posix_path_conversion (Particularly, see the last two entries) That only happens when calling native Windows programs from a msys shell. > > 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). Makes sense. Mike
