Stefan Beller authored Jan 04, 2018 and Junio C Hamano committed Jan 04, 2018

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
    b2feb643 Revert the whole "ask curl-config" topic for now
    47fbfded 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>