Subject: Re: obnoxious CLI complaints

From: René Scharfe <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2009 00:19:05 +0200

Junio C Hamano schrieb:
> Jakub Narebski <[email-masked]> writes:
> 
>> First, it would be consistent with how ordinary archivers such as tar
>> or zip are used, where you have to specify list of files to archive
>> (in our case this list is HEAD).  Second, I'd rather not accidentally
>> dump binary to terminal: "git archive [HEAD]" dumps archive to standard
>> output.
> 
> So does "cat".  I do not agree with your second point.
> 
> While I somewhat see the similarity argument, your first point, I am not
> sure if it is relevant.  It is not like "tar or zip allows us to say what
> files to archive, but git-archive doesn't and it always archives HEAD";
> you are saying "they require us to specify, so should we".
> 
> But I do not see a strong reason not to default to HEAD.  The case that
> would make difference would be to differentiate among
> 
> 	$ git archive HEAD TAIL
>         $ git archive HEAD -- TAIL
>         $ git archive -- HEAD TAIL
> 
> i.e. what if you happen to have a tracked content called HEAD.  I didn't
> check the current command line parser in git-archive understands the "--"
> convention for that, but it is not a rocket science to add it if it
> doesn't.

Currently it doesn't.  An attempt to implement it is below (tests and
documentation update missing).

I wonder if we want to make treeless calls to archive the worktree (or the
index) instead of HEAD, similar to git grep, though.  Not that I remember
someone requesting such a thing, but I'm already slightly surprised about
archive being used to tar up HEAD in any case -- I imagined it would mostly
be used to make releases of tagged versions.

---
 archive.c |   34 ++++++++++++++++++++++++----------
 1 files changed, 24 insertions(+), 10 deletions(-)

diff --git a/archive.c b/archive.c
index 0bca9ca..04fa6a5 100644
--- a/archive.c
+++ b/archive.c
@@ -214,18 +214,32 @@ static void parse_pathspec_arg(const char **pathspec,
 	ar_args->pathspec = get_pathspec(ar_args->base, pathspec);
 }
 
-static void parse_treeish_arg(const char **argv,
-		struct archiver_args *ar_args, const char *prefix)
+static int parse_treeish_arg(int argc, const char **argv,
+			     struct archiver_args *ar_args, const char *prefix)
 {
-	const char *name = argv[0];
+	const char *name = "HEAD";
 	const unsigned char *commit_sha1;
 	time_t archive_time;
 	struct tree *tree;
 	const struct commit *commit;
 	unsigned char sha1[20];
 
+	if (argc > 0) {
+		int consume = 1;
+
+		if (strcmp(argv[0], "--")) {
+			name = argv[0];
+			if (argc > 1 && !strcmp(argv[1], "--"))
+				consume++;
+		}
+
+		argc -= consume;
+		memmove(argv, argv + consume, argc * sizeof(*argv));
+		argv[argc] = NULL;
+	}
+
 	if (get_sha1(name, sha1))
-		die("Not a valid object name");
+		die("Not a valid object name: %s", name);
 
 	commit = lookup_commit_reference_gently(sha1, 1);
 	if (commit) {
@@ -256,6 +270,8 @@ static void parse_treeish_arg(const char **argv,
 	ar_args->commit_sha1 = commit_sha1;
 	ar_args->commit = commit;
 	ar_args->time = archive_time;
+
+	return argc;
 }
 
 #define OPT__COMPR(s, v, h, p) \
@@ -309,7 +325,8 @@ static int parse_archive_args(int argc, const char **argv,
 		OPT_END()
 	};
 
-	argc = parse_options(argc, argv, NULL, opts, archive_usage, 0);
+	argc = parse_options(argc, argv, NULL, opts, archive_usage,
+			     PARSE_OPT_KEEP_DASHDASH);
 
 	if (remote)
 		die("Unexpected option --remote");
@@ -327,9 +344,6 @@ static int parse_archive_args(int argc, const char **argv,
 		exit(0);
 	}
 
-	/* We need at least one parameter -- tree-ish */
-	if (argc < 1)
-		usage_with_options(archive_usage, opts);
 	*ar = lookup_archiver(format);
 	if (!*ar)
 		die("Unknown archive format '%s'", format);
@@ -361,8 +375,8 @@ int write_archive(int argc, const char **argv, const char *prefix,
 	if (setup_prefix && prefix == NULL)
 		prefix = setup_git_directory();
 
-	parse_treeish_arg(argv, &args, prefix);
-	parse_pathspec_arg(argv + 1, &args);
+	argc = parse_treeish_arg(argc, argv, &args, prefix);
+	parse_pathspec_arg(argv, &args);
 
 	git_config(git_default_config, NULL);
 
-- 
1.6.5.rc0