attr: add flag `--source` to work with tree-ish

The contents of the .gitattributes files may evolve over time, but "git
check-attr" always checks attributes against them in the working tree
and/or in the index. It may be beneficial to optionally allow the users
to check attributes taken from a commit other than HEAD against paths.

Add a new flag `--source` which will allow users to check the
attributes against a commit (actually any tree-ish would do). When the
user uses this flag, we go through the stack of .gitattributes files but
instead of checking the current working tree and/or in the index, we
check the blobs from the provided tree-ish object. This allows the
command to also be used in bare repositories.

Since we use a tree-ish object, the user can pass "--source
HEAD:subdirectory" and all the attributes will be looked up as if
subdirectory was the root directory of the repository.

We cannot simply use the `<rev>:<path>` syntax without the `--source`
flag, similar to how it is used in `git show` because any non-flag
parameter before `--` is treated as an attribute and any parameter after
`--` is treated as a pathname.

The change involves creating a new function `read_attr_from_blob`, which
given the path reads the blob for the path against the provided source and
parses the attributes line by line. This function is plugged into
`read_attr()` function wherein we go through the stack of attributes
files.

Signed-off-by: Karthik Nayak <karthik.188@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Toon Claes <toon@iotcl.com>
Co-authored-by: toon@iotcl.com
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/userdiff.c b/userdiff.c
index e25356a061..d71b82feb7 100644
--- a/userdiff.c
+++ b/userdiff.c
@@ -413,7 +413,7 @@ struct userdiff_driver *userdiff_find_by_path(struct index_state *istate,
 		check = attr_check_initl("diff", NULL);
 	if (!path)
 		return NULL;
-	git_check_attr(istate, path, check);
+	git_check_attr(istate, NULL, path, check);
 
 	if (ATTR_TRUE(check->items[0].value))
 		return &driver_true;