Re: [Question] Can git cat-file have a type filtering option?

From: Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com>
To: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Cc: ZheNing Hu <adlternative@gmail.com>,
	Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>,
	Git List <git@vger.kernel.org>,
	johncai86@gmail.com
Subject: Re: [Question] Can git cat-file have a type filtering option?
Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2023 19:20:19 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <ZDSZs8LgZzDLf5m1@nand.local> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20230410200141.GB104097@coredump.intra.peff.net>

On Mon, Apr 10, 2023 at 04:01:41PM -0400, Jeff King wrote:
> For that reason, and just for general flexibility, I think you are
> mostly better off piping cat-file through an external filter program
> (and then back to cat-file to get more data on each object).

Yeah, agreed. The convention of printing objects listed on the
command-line regardless of whether they would pass through the object
filter is confusing to me, too.

But using `rev-list --no-walk` to accomplish the same job for a filter
as trivial as the type-level one feels overkill anyway, so I agree that
just relying on `cat-file` to produce the list of objects, filtering it
yourself, and then handing it back to `cat-file` is the easiest thing to
do.

Thanks,
Taylor