On Sun, Sep 25, 2016 at 09:45:18PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote: > On Sun, Sep 25, 2016 at 9:34 PM, Jeff King <p...@peff.net> wrote: > > > > An easier (but less automatic) tool would be to improve our error > > message for the ambiguous case, and actually report details of the > > candidates. I'm working up a patch now. > > That sounds like a fun little lunch-break project. Thanks.
That's what I thought, but it turned out to be quite involved. :) I started by trying to teach get_short_sha1() to remember all of the candidates it sees, but it turns out to be surprisingly complicated. I did have something working, but I scrapped it in favor of just looking at the object database again. It's the error code path, so it's OK to be slower (especially if it keeps the non-error code path much simpler). But then being the diligent programmer that I am, I added a tests. And that failed because of an unrelated bug. Fixing that revealed another bug. And so on. The good news is that I think I've finally cleared up all of the long-standing bugs where git will print the same error message twice. Those have been annoying me for yours (and apparently others[1]). Patches 2-4 and 9 are all bugfixes. Patch 10 is the interesting part. The rest are just cleanups and refactoring. [01/10]: get_sha1: detect buggy calls with multiple disambiguators [02/10]: get_sha1: avoid repeating ourselves via ONLY_TO_DIE [03/10]: get_sha1: propagate flags to child functions [04/10]: get_short_sha1: peel tags when looking for treeish [05/10]: get_short_sha1: refactor init of disambiguation code [06/10]: get_short_sha1: NUL-terminate hex prefix [07/10]: get_short_sha1: mark ambiguity error for translation [08/10]: sha1_array: let callbacks interrupt iteration [09/10]: for_each_abbrev: drop duplicate objects [10/10]: get_short_sha1: list ambiguous objects on error Of course this is all totally orthogonal to Linus's original question. I hope it will make things more pleasant when somebody does end up having to look up a too-short sha1, but it's probably still a good idea to bump the default. -Peff [1] http://public-inbox.org/git/504b91b7.1000...@avtalion.name/
