diffcore: add a pickaxe option to find a specific blob

Sometimes users are given a hash of an object and they want to
identify it further (ex.: Use verify-pack to find the largest blobs,
but what are these? or [1])

One might be tempted to extend git-describe to also work with blobs,
such that `git describe <blob-id>` gives a description as
'<commit-ish>:<path>'.  This was implemented at [2]; as seen by the sheer
number of responses (>110), it turns out this is tricky to get right.
The hard part to get right is picking the correct 'commit-ish' as that
could be the commit that (re-)introduced the blob or the blob that
removed the blob; the blob could exist in different branches.

Junio hinted at a different approach of solving this problem, which this
patch implements. Teach the diff machinery another flag for restricting
the information to what is shown. For example:

    $ ./git log --oneline --find-object=v2.0.0:Makefile
    b2feb64309 Revert the whole "ask curl-config" topic for now
    47fbfded53 i18n: only extract comments marked with "TRANSLATORS:"

we observe that the Makefile as shipped with 2.0 was appeared in
v1.9.2-471-g47fbfded53 and in v2.0.0-rc1-5-gb2feb6430b.  The
reason why these commits both occur prior to v2.0.0 are evil
merges that are not found using this new mechanism.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/223678/which-commit-has-this-blob
[2] https://public-inbox.org/git/20171028004419.10139-1-sbeller@google.com/

Signed-off-by: Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 20 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/diff.c b/diff.c
index 5508745dc8..a872bdcac1 100644
--- a/diff.c
+++ b/diff.c
@@ -4082,6 +4082,7 @@ void diff_setup(struct diff_options *options)
 	options->interhunkcontext = diff_interhunk_context_default;
 	options->ws_error_highlight = ws_error_highlight_default;
 	options->flags.rename_empty = 1;
+	options->objfind = NULL;
 
 	/* pathchange left =NULL by default */
 	options->change = diff_change;
@@ -4487,6 +4488,23 @@ static int parse_ws_error_highlight_opt(struct diff_options *opt, const char *ar
 	return 1;
 }
 
+static int parse_objfind_opt(struct diff_options *opt, const char *arg)
+{
+	struct object_id oid;
+
+	if (get_oid(arg, &oid))
+		return error("unable to resolve '%s'", arg);
+
+	if (!opt->objfind)
+		opt->objfind = xcalloc(1, sizeof(*opt->objfind));
+
+	opt->pickaxe_opts |= DIFF_PICKAXE_KIND_OBJFIND;
+	opt->flags.recursive = 1;
+	opt->flags.tree_in_recursive = 1;
+	oidset_insert(opt->objfind, &oid);
+	return 1;
+}
+
 int diff_opt_parse(struct diff_options *options,
 		   const char **av, int ac, const char *prefix)
 {
@@ -4736,7 +4754,8 @@ int diff_opt_parse(struct diff_options *options,
 	else if ((argcount = short_opt('O', av, &optarg))) {
 		options->orderfile = prefix_filename(prefix, optarg);
 		return argcount;
-	}
+	} else if (skip_prefix(arg, "--find-object=", &arg))
+		return parse_objfind_opt(options, arg);
 	else if ((argcount = parse_long_opt("diff-filter", av, &optarg))) {
 		int offending = parse_diff_filter_opt(optarg, options);
 		if (offending)