Subject: Re: [GSoC PATCH v9 2/5] repo: add the field references.format

From: Phillip Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2025 14:58:07 +0100

On 13/08/2025 22:46, Eric Sunshine wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 13, 2025 at 5:18 PM Lucas Seiki Oshiro
> <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> I don't think that Phillip was suggesting dropping only the reordering
> while keeping the deduplication; he was merely giving an example of an
> alternative implementation which would accomplish the deduplication
> goal, so he wasn't asking to over-engineer. Instead, (according to my
> reading), he is suggesting dropping both deduplication and reordering.

Exactly
>> If I follow
>> this path of returning the values in the same order they were in the
>> command line, I think it would be better to just allow duplicated keys
>> and multiple "key not found" errors for the same unknown key instead
>> of increasing the complexity of this command.
>>
>> What do you think?
> 
> I think that's exactly what Phillip was suggesting: present output in
> order requested, no deduplication
> 
> I had suggested the same back in [*], but I also said that I could
> formulate arguments in favor of either behavior, so I didn't have a
> strong opinion. However, Phillip has presented a good reason to prefer
> "output in order requested, no deduplication", and I do find his
> argument compelling.

If this command was producing output primarily for human consumption 
then I think the argument for sorting and de-duplicating the output 
would be much stronger. However, as this command is intended to replace 
some uses of "git rev-parse" in scripts, I think that "output in order 
requested, no de-duplication" is more convenient.

Thanks

Phillip