Re: git diff

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 04:46:16PM -0600, Carter Lamb wrote:

> I use git diff --summary --numstat <commit> to report the files
> modified, created, and deleted between the current commit and some
> prior commit. The --stat and --numstat options count the lines added
> and deleted for each file. Is there a way to report the lines modified
> for each file. For example:

Not really, because it's not well defined. Consider your example:

> Given content below for commit 1:
> aaaaa
> ccccc
> 
> Given content below for commit 2:
> aaaaa
> bbbbb
> ccccc
> 
> Given content below for commit 3:
> Aaaaa
> Bbbbb
> ccccc
> ddddd

How do we know that "Aaaaa" is a modification of line "aaaaa", and not
simply the deletion of the old line and the addition of a new one? It's
easy to come up with a case where that is more obvious:

  -aaaaa
  +ddddd

but there are many shades of gray in between. Is:

  -aaaaa
  +Aaada

the deletion of an old line and the introduction of a new one, or the
modification of an existing line?  So fundamentally the diff format just
deals with added and removed lines, and modifications are represented as
a delete followed by an add.

Which isn't to say you couldn't think of many clever algorithms for
heuristically determining a modification, but git doesn't do that itself
in numstat.

-Peff