Re: [RFC] xl command for visualizing recent history

[Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com>]

Hi

On 31/10/2019 08:26, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Wed, 30 Oct 2019, Emily Shaffer wrote:
> 
>> On Mon, Oct 28, 2019 at 05:30:23PM -0700, Matthew DeVore wrote:
>>> From: Matthew DeVore <matvore@gmail.com>
>>> [...]
> 
> In addition, I would think that the introduction of ephemeral refs
> should deserve its own patch. Such ephemeral refs might come in handy
> for more things than just `xl` (or whatever better name we find).
> 
> The design of such ephemeral refs is thoroughly interesting, too.

I agree the ephemeral refs are interesting and could be really useful

> One very obvious question is whether you want these refs to be
> worktree-specific or not. I would tend to answer "yes" to that question.

If we go for a per-terminal namespace as you suggest below I'm not sure 
if we want/need them to be per worktree as well. I don't have a clear 
idea how I'd want to use ephemeral refs if I changed worktree but kept 
working in the same terminal.

> Further, another obvious question is what to do with those refs after a
> while. They are _clearly_ intended to be ephemeral, i.e. they should
> just vanish after a reasonably short time. Which raises the question:
> what is "reasonably short" in this context? We would probably want to
> come up with a good default and then offer a config setting to change
> it.

Maybe keep them around for a couple of days? Even that might be longer 
than we need.

> Another important aspect is the naming. The naming schema you chose
> (`h/<counter>`) is short-and-sweet, and might very well be in use
> already, for totally different purposes. It would be a really good idea
> to open that schema to allow for avoiding clashes with already-existing
> refs.
> 
> A better alternative might be to choose a naming schema that cannot
> clash with existing refs because it would not make for valid ref names.
> I had a look at the ref name validation, and `^<counter>` might be a
> better naming schema to begin with: `^1` is not a valid ref name, for
> example.

That's an interesting idea, it's short and wont tread on anyone's toes.

> Side note: why `h/`? I really tried to think about possible motivations
> and came up empty.
> 
> Another aspect that I think should be considered: why limit these
> ephemeral refs to `git xl`? I cannot count how often I look through
> some `git log <complicated-options> -- <sophisticated-magic-refspecs>`
> to find a certain commit and then need to reference it. I usually move
> my hand to move the mouse pointer and double click, then Shift-Insert
> (which is awkward on this here keyboard because Insert is Fn+Delete, so
> I cannot do that with one hand), and I usually wish for some better way.
> 
> A better way might be to introduce an option for generating and
> displaying such ephemeral refs, in my case it would be good to have a
> config setting to do that automatically for every `git log` call that
> uses the pager, i.e. is interactive.

Having them as a feature of the rev listing machinery rather than 
specific to a particular command sounds like a good way to go.

> Finally, I could imagine that in this context, we would love to have
> refs that are purely intended for interactive use, and therefore it
> would make sense to try to bind them to the process ID of the process
> calling `git`, i.e. the interactive shell. That way, when I have two
> terminal windows, they would "own" their separate ephemeral refs.

I like that idea, though I think it should probably be based around 
getsid() rather than getppid() (I'm not sure how that translates to windows)


Best Wishes

Phillip

>>> The test cases show non-trivial output which can be used to get an idea
>>> for what the command is good for, though it doesn't capture the
>>> coloring.
>>>
>>> The primary goals of this command are:
>>>
>>>   a) deduce what the user wants to see based on what they haven't pushed
>>>      upstream yet
>>>   b) show the active branches spatially rather than as a linear list (as
>>>      in "git branch")
>>>   c) allow the user to easily refer to commits that appeared in the
>>>      output
>>>
>>> I considered making the h/# tags stable across invocations such that a
>>> particular hash will only be tagged with a different number if ~100
>>> other hashes are tagged since the hash was last tagged. I didn't
>>> actually implement it this way, instead opting for always re-numbering
>>> the hashes on each invocation. This means the hash number is
>>> predictable based on the position the hash appears in the output, which
>>> is probably better that encouraging users to memorize hash numbers (or
>>> use them in scripts!).
>>
>> If you're worried about folks using something like this in a script (and
>> I would be, given that it's dynamically assigning nicknames to hashes)
>> then you probably ought to mark it as a porcelain command in
>> command-list.txt.
> 
> I would like to caution against targeting scripts with this. It is too
> easy for two concurrently running scripts to stumble over each other.
> 
> Scripts should use safer methods that already exist, like grabbing the
> hash while looking for a specific pattern (`sed`'s hold space comes to
> mind).
> 
> Ciao,
> Dscho
>