Re: Git log can not show history before rename

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Fri, 30 Jan 2009, Frank Li wrote:
>
> Does it conflict with --parents?

Yes. --follow and --parents do not play well together.

That's simply because --follow is a total hack, meant to just satisfy 
ex-SVN users who never knew anything about things like parenthood or nice 
revision graphs anyway.

It's not totally fundamental, but the current implementation of "--follow" 
is really a quick preprocessing thing bolted onto the revision walking 
logic, rather than beign anything really integral.

If you want --follow to really work together with --parents (and to do the 
right thing wrt merges etc - different renames coming in through different 
branches), you'd really have to rewrite the whole --follow logic.

One approach is to use --follow as the quick hack it is - and then when 
you see "oh, file X was renamed from file Y", and you want to see the nice 
full history, you go back to the native git model (which is not --follow), 
which is based on pathname pattherns, and then do

	gitk -- X Y

to see the history of _both_ names, and now the rename will show up 
properly (and now you'll get proper parenthood because you're no longer 
using the hackish --follow thing).

If somebody wants to do a more intelligent --follow, I can only applaud, 
but I'm personally not likely to look into it.

			Linus