Re: [PATCH 2/3] Introduce rename factorization in diffcore.

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

Yann Dirson <ydirson@altern.org> writes:

> On Fri, Nov 07, 2008 at 12:19:14PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>> I am afraid that this is totally unacceptable, as you yourself mentioned,
>> the end result is unapplicable with any existing tool and would confuse
>> viewers like gitk and gitweb.
>
> Well, other tools will still have to be taught about a new syntax, if
> they're going to use the new flag - just like it was for --rename.

You are mistaken.  For a patch, you are dealing with two different
parties: producer and consumer.  If you are adding new feature to the
producer, the output format should be desigend to allow the consumer tell
that it is something it does not know how to handle.

Marking a non patch with "diff --git" to trigger the logic to signal the
beginning of a patch to git-apply (and perhaps other tools) is a non
starter.

And for this "we are giving a patch that your git-apply can apply and gitk
can show, but by the way we also think the whole directory foo moved to
new location bar" is merely an additional information.  You should still
be able to apply the patch with tools that are unaware of this new
directory move detection feature.