stg bottom

[clillies]

When scripting, I often want to find the first commit in my series.
The sha of the first commit can be deduced by other means of course, but I noticed
that the there is a stg top command which prints the patch name of the top applied patch.

So, even though it would be nice and probably fairly easy to add stg bottom, which would show
the bottom applied patch (or error if none is applied), I see some overlap between
stg top and stg series and even stg show.

Could we instead extend stg series and add --top and --bottom (or perhaps --only-top or --only-bottom), and some kind of formatter args, --name-only to get only the name. The --top and --bottom would then be affected by -A and -U and -H, instead of just work with -A as today.
Then stg top could be thanked, pensioned and deprecated/retired, and we would get (at least eventually) one command less, but more functionality in existing commands.

Just an idea.

[jpgrayson]

You can use stg series the -P/--no-prefix option and an absolute index of 0 to print the bottom patch. I.e.:

stg series -P 0

The topmost patch could similarly be printed by using @ or the relative index +0 or -0:

stg series -P @

So while not as on the nose as having --top and --bottom options, stg series can already largely do what you're requesting.

Note that to see the first unapplied patch (which you might call the bottom of the unapplied), use the +1 relative index.

stg series -P +1

And the last (topmost) unapplied patch can be accessed using ^ (may need to quote that depending on your shell).

stg series -P '^'

It would be straightforward to add aliases for one or more of these. E.g.

git config --global stgit.alias.bottom 'series --no-prefix 0'

You can then just invoke:

stg bottom

I don't think StGit needs more options or commands for printing patches. All the fancy patch locators were added to solve this problem. I could perhaps be convinced about stg bottom to have symmetry with stg top.

Perhaps its also worth noting that you perhaps don't even really want to print the, e.g. bottom most patch, but instead want to point various other stg commands to the bottom patch. Well, good news: that fancy patch locator syntax is available across all commands already. E.g. to refresh changes to the bottom most patch:

stg refresh -p 0

[jpgrayson]

The stg(1) man page covers the patch locator syntax in detail.

[clillies]

Thank you! This looks good.