Re: git rev-list -S ?

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Holger Hellmuth <hellmuth@ira.uka.de> writes:

> I read the GsoC page about the ultimate tracking tool just now and
> couldn't find the -S option in git rev-list documentation...

Slippery finger.

|    $ git log -S'it drives an external
|   an external' master Documentation/RelNotes

is a way to find commits that introduced and then removed the block of
text to files in the named directory, starting at the tip of 'master'.

Most of the "ultimate tracking tool" dream has already been realized in
"git blame" except one major part.  Once you find where the blame lies,
the tool _could_ help the user to find where these blamed lines came from
more than it currently does.  Were they typed anew?  Were similar lines
removed by the commit from other files?  Often people run "blame" on a
line range they are interested in, find the commits that were blamed, look
at "git show $the_found_commit" to see if they can find similar lines in
deleted parts of other files and then finally run blame again on the
deleted line range of these other files starting from the parent commit of
the found commit to do this (and this needs to be repeated).  A good GUI
should be able to help this process quite a lot, if backed by a good logic
to detect "similar" code blocks.