Subject: Re: svn versus git

From: Andy Parkins <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 14 Dec 2006 09:19:29 +0000

On Wednesday 2006 December 13 23:45, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> ls-tree is not Porcelain and has right to expose the internals

Of course; but there is no porcelain to do that operation.

> by default.  "git ls-tree --name-only" could be aliased to give
> "git ls" if you wanted to, but I wonder how often you would want
> to run:
>
> 	svn list -r538
>
> and for what purpose?

I've never done it.  However, the command is there in subversion, so I was 
comparing git's implementation of that command.  I wouldn't completely write 
it off though.  It doesn't seem unreasonable to want to see what files were 
in an old revision.

> I often find myself doing
> 	git diff -r --name-status v1.3.0 HEAD

I can live with that as an acceptable alternative to "svn list"; however, as 
usual, how does my imaginary ex-svn user find out about that?  man git-diff 
isn't the first place /I'd/ go; and even if you do, you won't find the "-r" 
or "--name-status" options; you have to go to git-diff-files, git-diff-index 
or git-diff-tree - and you're meant to guess which is the right one.

Bear in mind that my current theme isn't "can git do...?" it's "how does a 
user know that git can do...?"

> What do people use "svn list -r538" for and how often?  In other
> words, when does it become necessary to get the full list of
> paths in an arbitrary revision?

Me: I don't do it often.  It's not something I'd lose sleep over if git 
doesn't have an easy way of doing it.  However, it was in the output 
of "svn --help"; so I included it.

Andy
-- 
Dr Andy Parkins, M Eng (hons), MIEE