From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Theodore Tso Subject: Re: Confusion about diffing branches Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2007 13:05:04 -0400 Message-ID: <20070827170504.GH4680@thunk.org> References: <20070826233555.GA7422@mediacenter.austin.rr.com> <7v6431omn8.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org> <20070827014056.GB7422@mediacenter.austin.rr.com> <7vlkbxmp50.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org> <20070827075009.GA31438@glandium.org> <38b2ab8a0708270621l63f3da56j4667014e62a5de92@mail.gmail.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Cc: Mike Hommey , Junio C Hamano , Shawn Bohrer , git@vger.kernel.org To: Francis Moreau X-From: git-owner@vger.kernel.org Mon Aug 27 19:06:09 2007 Return-path: Envelope-to: gcvg-git@gmane.org Received: from vger.kernel.org ([209.132.176.167]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.50) id 1IPi1o-0004I1-6J for gcvg-git@gmane.org; Mon, 27 Aug 2007 19:05:40 +0200 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1755949AbXH0RFY (ORCPT ); Mon, 27 Aug 2007 13:05:24 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1755931AbXH0RFY (ORCPT ); Mon, 27 Aug 2007 13:05:24 -0400 Received: from THUNK.ORG ([69.25.196.29]:51344 "EHLO thunker.thunk.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1755497AbXH0RFX (ORCPT ); Mon, 27 Aug 2007 13:05:23 -0400 Received: from root (helo=candygram.thunk.org) by thunker.thunk.org with local-esmtps (tls_cipher TLS-1.0:RSA_AES_256_CBC_SHA:32) (Exim 4.50 #1 (Debian)) id 1IPiAL-0000FA-Br; Mon, 27 Aug 2007 13:14:17 -0400 Received: from tytso by candygram.thunk.org with local (Exim 4.63) (envelope-from ) id 1IPi1Q-00079P-BG; Mon, 27 Aug 2007 13:05:04 -0400 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <38b2ab8a0708270621l63f3da56j4667014e62a5de92@mail.gmail.com> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.13 (2006-08-11) X-SA-Exim-Connect-IP: X-SA-Exim-Mail-From: tytso@thunk.org X-SA-Exim-Scanned: No (on thunker.thunk.org); SAEximRunCond expanded to false Sender: git-owner@vger.kernel.org Precedence: bulk X-Mailing-List: git@vger.kernel.org Archived-At: 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