Subject: Re: [PATCH] git-filter-branch: add --egrep-filter option

From: Phil Hord <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Apr 2011 12:03:13 -0400

On 04/19/2011 04:01 AM, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Michael O'Cleirigh wrote:
>
>> After considering your comment I have to agree with you that it is a
>> special case of index-filter and probably not useful/general for
>> enough other cases to justify adding in a new command line option.
> Now, why do you give up so easily? ;-)
>
> Surely what your patch is hinting at is the possibility of an
> --ls-tree-filter (for lack of a better name) that works with trees
> without the overhead of unpacking them.

I have invented something similar[*] for git three different times in
three different ways.  The last one is the fastest and uses
git-fast-import instead of filter-branch, but I was sure one of the
filter-branch methods would have been more efficient.  More examples
would be very welcome.

Phil

[*] My implementations mostly focused on applying a ".gitignore" file to
the repo history.  I spent many hours on this.  I wound up with a script
that also handles file and branch renaming (the latter important so I
can run different filters on the same repo and drop results into
different branches).  It's not patch-worthy (yet), but I would have
loved to have more examples along the way such as the mktree one you
just provided.