Re: [PATCH v5 15/15] fast-export: don't handle uninteresting refs

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:

> If you changed your stance on the patch Sverre and I sent to fix this, we
> could get a non-partial fix for this.

This is long time ago so I may be misremembering the details, but I
thought the original patch was (ab)using object flags to mark "this
was explicitly asked for, even though some other range operation may
have marked it uninteresting".  Because it predated the introduction
of the rev_cmdline_info mechanism to record what was mentioned on
the command line separately from what objects are uninteresting
(i.e. object flags), it may have been one convenient way to record
this information, but it still looked unnecessarily ugly hack to me,
in that it allocated scarce object flag bits to represent a narrow
special case (iirc, only a freestanding "A" on the command line but
not "A" spelled in "B..A", or something), making it more expensive
to record other kinds of command line information in a way
consistent with the approach chosen (we do not want to waste object
flag bits in order to record "this was right hand side tip of the
symmetric difference range" and such).

If you are calling "do not waste object flags to represent one
special case among endless number of possibilities, as it will make
it impossible to extend it" my stance, that hasn't changed.

We added rev_cmdline_info since then so that we can tell what refs
were given from the command line in what way, and I thought that we
applied a patch from Sverre that uses it instead of the object
flags.  Am I misremembering things?