Re: [PATCH 2/2] attr: add flag `-r|--revisions` to work with revisions

[Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com>]

On Tue, Dec 6, 2022 at 7:15 PM Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> Karthik Nayak <karthik.188@gmail.com> writes:
> > Add a new flag `--revision`/`-r` which will allow it work with
> > revisions. This command will now, instead of checking the files/index,
> > try and receive the blob for the given attribute file against the
> > provided revision. The flag overrides checking against the index and
> > filesystem and also works with bare repositories.
>
> As "check-attr" was not invented as a user-facing subcommand but was
> a hack for debugging, I would have minded this change, but these
> days people seem to treat it as if it is just one of the proper
> plumbing commands, the new command line convention bothers me a
> bit.  No other command uses --<anything> to signal that what comes
> after it is a rev.
>
> But I do not think of a better alternative without making the
> command line ambiguous, so I'll stop at raising a concern, so that
> others who may be better at UI can come up with one.

A few minor comments...

We don't usually squat on short options, such as `-r`, right from the
start but only add the short alias once shown that there is demand.

Option `-r` has strong association with "recursive" elsewhere, so I'd
worry about giving it such a completely different meaning here.

Rather than calling the option `--revision`, perhaps pattern it after
git-restore's `--source` option which allows specifying a particular
commit, tree, tag, etc.?