Re: Finding all commits which modify a file

[Neal Kreitzinger <nkreitzinger@gmail.com>]

On 1/20/2012 3:35 PM, Neal Groothuis wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm trying to find /all/ commits that change a file in the
> repository...and its proving to be trickier than I thought. :-)
>
> The situation that we were dealing with is this:
>
> - Person A and person B both pull from the same central repository.
>
> - Person A makes a change to file foo.txt and bar.txt, commits, and pushes
> to the central repository.
>
> - Person B makes a similar change to bar.txt and commits it.
>
> - Person B does a fetch and merge.  Since both A and B made changes to
> bar.txt, this requires conflicts to be resolved manually.
>
> - B reverts A's changes to foo.txt. (If B is coming from a different
> revision control system, this may happen due to confusion about how merges
> are handled.)
>
> - B commits the changes.
>
> - B makes more changes to bar.txt, commits them, and pushes to the central
> repository.
>
> At this point, A's changes to foo.txt have been undone.
>
> Graphically:
>
>      A1
>     /  ^
>    v    \
>    C1   B2<-B3
>    ^    /
>     \  v
>      B1
>
> B1, B2, and B3 have the same version of foo.txt as C1, A1 modifies it.
>
> Person A discovers that his changes are missing and wants to know what
> happened.
>
> git log foo.txt doesn't help; it won't even show commit A1, due to history
> simplification.
>
> git log --full-history foo.txt will show commit A1.  It still won't show
> commit B2, though, which we'd also like to show (because that's where the
> change to foo.txt got removed).
>
> I would think that git log --simplify-merges foo.txt would have done what
> I'd wanted, but it still does not show commit B2.   Based on what I'm
> reading in the man page, I would expect the simplification to go like
> this:
>
>      A1
>      | ^
>      |  \
>      |  B2<-B3
>      |  /
>      v v
>      C1
>
> (since B1 is TREESAME as C1 if we're only considering foo.txt)
>
>      A1
>      | ^
>      |  \
>      |  B2<-B3
>      |
>      v
>      C1
>
> (since C1 is an ancestor of A1)
>
> However, the actual output only includes A1, not B2.
>
>   - Can someone explain this, and/or
>   - can someone offer a command to display all commits (including merges)
> in which ANY parent is not TREESAME?
>
Does git-log --all help?

v/r,
neal