Hi Yaroslav
On 04/08/2022 23:59, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote:
Dear Git Gurus,
In DataLad (https://datalad.org) we are doing "our own" analysis of what
specific files (not entire directories) should git and git-annex operate
on. Obviously, in large repositories (and we have with >100k files)
that might require invoking git add or git diff etc with a long list
of paths specified in the command line. For that we often split
invocation into multiple and even resort to git commit --amend to
combine multiple commits then into a single one.
But I wondered if may be there is already some trick to make such
commands as status, diff, add, commit to operate on arbitrarily long
list of paths passed to that git command somehow.
A number of porcelain commands have a --pathspec-from-file option that
takes a file with a list of pathspecs or reads them from stdin. When
combined with --pathspec-file-nul this handles paths containing newline
correctly or you can quote them without this option. You can pass
--literal-pathspecs if you have a list of paths rather than pathspecs.
At the plumbing level you can use "update-index" to add/delete/update
paths in the index which will read paths from stdin and "checkout-index"
will also read paths from stdin.
The diff family do not have any support for --pathspec-from-file at the
moment but I'd be happy to see someone implement it (I think it would be
fairly straight forward).
Note that gitglossary (at least in 2.35.1 git on debian) says that
Pathspecs are used on the command line of "git ls-files", "git
ls-tree", "git add", "git grep", "git diff", "git checkout", and many other
commands ...
but
$> git ls-tree -h | head -n1
usage: git ls-tree [<options>] <tree-ish> [<path>...]
so it is <path> not the <pathspec> like (why in stderr this time?)
$> git commit -h 2>&1 | head -n1
usage: git commit [<options>] [--] <pathspec>...
So if in both cases it is pathspec, may be pathspec could support some
other magical keyword like :(filelist)/tmp/mylonglistofpaths ?
I like that path magic idea, but as we already have --pathspec-from-file
I think we'd be better improving support for that.
Best Wishes
Phillip
Thanks in advance for your time and thoughts,
