Re: Confusion about diffing branches

[Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Mon, Aug 27, 2007 at 03:21:32PM +0200, Francis Moreau wrote:
> This "inconsistency" had already been raised before. Please refer to:
> http://www.gelato.unsw.edu.au/archives/git/0612/35354.html

That's not a major inconsistency problem IMHO because git diff does
not take a set of commits, but rather two end points --- conceptually,
there's no way to make sense out of trying to feed an arbitrary set of
commitments to git-diff.

The bigger inconsistency is with git-format-patch, which *does* take a
set of commits, and where "git-format-patch a" does operates on a very
different set of commits than what what "git-rev-list a" returns.  I
understand that for backwards compatibility "git-format-patch a" is
equivalent to "git-format-patch a..HEAD", but what it means is that
all other ways of specifying sets of commits work with
git-format-patch, *except* if you want to specify all commits from the
beginning of time to a particular head (i.e., "git-rev-list a") is
something that you simply can not possibly do using git-format-patch.
This was mentioned on a blog entry as one of those "really confusing
inconsistencies" in git.

						- Ted