Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > Karthik Nayak <karthik.188@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > >> The `git-for-each-ref(1)` command is used to iterate over references >> present in a repository. In large repositories with millions of >> references, it would be optimal to paginate this output such that we >> can start iteration from a given reference. > > I haven't looked at the patches, but should the end-user's mental > model of the process be like this? > > - We have a native order in which references are sorted and that is > what "git for-each-ref" without "--sort" option gives them. > > - They can use the "--skip-until" option to seek in the above order > and start iterating in the middle. > > - If they give "--sort", the set of refs to be shown would not > change; skipping is done in the native order and then the > remainder is given sorted. > > Please make sure that the documentation is clear enough to avoid a > misunderstanding that this feature would kick in after we grab all > refs and sort them. If it worked that way, it would allow us to say > "going from newer to older, but skipping the most recent ones that > were touched within a week", which would have been nice, but that is > not what we are doing with this feature---I think it is OK but we > need to be clear about it in the documentation. > I totally didn't consider '--sort'. I do agree that we should document that behavior if we tend to keep it as is. I wonder if it is worthwhile to even prevent the two from being used together. I find the whole "we skip before sorting" to be very confusing. >> This series adds a '--skip-until' option in 'git-for-each-ref(1)'. When >> used, the reference iteration seeks to the first matching reference and >> iterates from there onward. > > OK. Even the filesystem backed ones we internall sort after doing > readdir() loop, so this is feasible. Nice. > Yup. We have 'sort_ref_dir()' to sort each directory parsed. >> Initally I was also planning to cleanup all the `refs_for_each...()` >> functions in 'refs.h' by simply using the iterator, but this bloated the >> series. So I've left that for another day. > > OK.
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