Subject: Re: [PATCH gitk 0/4] gitk support for git log -L

From: Thomas Rast <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 2013 15:17:41 +0200

Jens Lehmann <[email-masked]> writes:

> Am 29.07.2013 21:37, schrieb Thomas Rast:
>> Thomas Rast <[email-masked]> writes:
>> 
>>> Thomas Rast <[email-masked]> writes:
>>>
>>>> Now that git log -L has hit master, I figure it's time to discuss the
>>>> corresponding change to gitk.
>>>
>>> Paul, any news on this?  Any chance we can get it into the next release,
>>> since that will also be the first release to ship with 'git log -L'?
>> 
>> Jens pointed out privately that the handling of unstuck -L options is
>> unfortunate, to put it mildly.  I'll send a reroll.
>
> But as soon as that is fixed I'd really like to see this applied, as
> I think gitk is the perfect tool to show history information.

Unfortunately it's turning out to be harder than I hoped.  gitk runs the
arguments through git-rev-parse, which only knows that -n gets an
unstuck argument.  Consequently, gitk accepts an unstuck -n but only
stuck forms of -S and -G.

Fixing it through git-rev-parse feels wrong; rev-parse is supposed to
know about rev-list options, but -S and -G only make sense in
diff-generating walks, and -L only makes any sense at all for git-log.

I'm tempted to leave it at the existing patches for now.  That does mean
that -L can only be used in the stuck form; it's the same for -S and -G
already.  Then in a later series we can change gitk's argument parsing
to properly treat the options directly, passing only the remaining
arguments through to rev-parse to use the usual revision/filename
distinction logic.

-- 
Thomas Rast
trast@{inf,student}.ethz.ch