Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> writes: >> When you do have the cycles perhaps it is worth considering whether >> splitting it up, so that --as-filter is a modifier for traversal stoppers, >> would avoid the problem of proliferating options. Eg, instead of saying >> --since-as-filter you would say --since ... --as-filter. That way the >> stoppers where "filter like behavior" made sense could just check if the >> --as-filter flag was set. > > Yes, that has exactly the opposite problem I wanted to warn us about > by sending an extra message (to which you are reponding to). If we > have (or can have) very many traversal stopping option, it might > make sense to have --as-filter as a modifier and avoid doubling the > number of options, but if we only have very few (and fundamentally > cannot have more than very few), then giving each of these very few > --X its own --X-as-filter variant would probably make more sense. > Because end users would probably not know which ones are inherently > filters and will not be affected with --as-filter modifier, it would > help them understand if we give them independent --since-as-filter > option and document it separately, if there aren't many of them. > > Besides, if we had very few but still multiple of them, --X and > --Y-as-filter can be combined to say "X stops as before, but Y is > applied as filter", which is strictly more expressive than a > separate --as-filter modifier. > > So that is why I threw out the message for those interested in the > topic to first think about. I know we agree that --since may be a > good candidate to have these two flavours of behaviour. I do not > think anybody carefully thought about existing options to see if > there are many like --since that want two flavours, let alone > possible options we have said in the past that we may want to have > but not yet added. Now I had some time to think about it, I have a feeling that it is quite unlikely for us to add traversal stopper other than since, so having a separate "--as-filter" would probably be more confusing than adding "--since-as-filter", stressing on "only the 'show commits with timestamp after this one' has two variants". Thanks.
