Re: [BUG?] gitk assumes initial commit is empty

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

Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek  <zbyszek@in.waw.pl> writes:

> In gitk, the next commit shows changes to some files, like if they existed
> in the parent commit. So it seems that gitk assumes that initial commit
> is empty, which doesn't have to be true.

It is not about assuming but by unfortunate design.

In early days, all projects managed by git (except for git itself) had the
product of a fairly mature development hsitory in their first commit, and
it was deemed unnecessary clutter to show additions of these thousands of
paths as a patch.

This was not just about gitk but git itself. "git log" learned to show the
patch for the initial commit without requiring --root command line option
only at 0f03ca9 (config option log.showroot to show the diff of root
commits, 2006-11-23).

These days I think gitk should learn to do the same ;-)