Re: [PATCH v2] gitk: Show patch for initial commit

[Marcus Karlsson <mk@acc.umu.se>]

On Sat, Oct 01, 2011 at 11:03:18PM +0200, Zbigniew J??drzejewski-Szmek wrote:
> [cc: Paul Mackerras]
> 
> Hi,
> I think that the historical explanation that Junio gave could
> be used as a basis for a commit message:
> 
>   In early days, all projects managed by git (except for git itself) had the
>   product of a fairly mature development history in their first commit, and
>   it was deemed unnecessary clutter to show additions of these thousands of
>   paths as a patch.
> 
>   "git log" learned to show the patch for the initial commit without requiring
>   --root command line option at 0f03ca9 (config option log.showroot to show
>   the diff of root commits, 2006-11-23).
> 
>   Teach gitk to respect log.showroot.

Absolutely, that would be a much better commit message. I'll wait and
see if there are more comments and then resubmit.

> Also the gitk should be mentioned in the man-page for git-config log.showroot.
> The current description of this option seems suboptimal because it explains
> how it used to be, which is not really relevant:
>   log.showroot
>     If true, the initial commit will be shown as a big creation event. This is
>     equivalent to a diff against an empty tree. Tools like git-log(1) or git-
>     whatchanged(1), which normally hide the root commit will now show it. True by
>     default.
> This could be changed to:
>     If true (the default), the root commit will be shown as a big creation
>     event --- a diff against an empty tree. This diff can be very large for
>     a project which was imported into git after some development history.
>     If log.showroot is false tools like git-log(1), git-whatchanged(1), or
>     gitk(1) will not display the added files.

I agree, but that feels like something that could be made into a
separate patch. Or should I include that too?

	Marcus