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, 4 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/attr.h b/attr.h
index 3fb40cced0..fca6c30430 100644
--- a/attr.h
+++ b/attr.h
@@ -108,6 +108,7 @@
  */
 
 struct index_state;
+struct object_id;
 
 /**
  * An attribute is an opaque object that is identified by its name. Pass the
@@ -190,13 +191,14 @@ void attr_check_free(struct attr_check *check);
 const char *git_attr_name(const struct git_attr *);
 
 void git_check_attr(struct index_state *istate,
-		    const char *path, struct attr_check *check);
+		    const struct object_id *tree_oid, const char *path,
+		    struct attr_check *check);
 
 /*
  * Retrieve all attributes that apply to the specified path.
  * check holds the attributes and their values.
  */
-void git_all_attrs(struct index_state *istate,
+void git_all_attrs(struct index_state *istate, const struct object_id *tree_oid,
 		   const char *path, struct attr_check *check);
 
 enum git_attr_direction {