Re: determine a linux kernel version of a patch file

[Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>]

Hi,

On 2015-05-15 19:03, Kelvin Li wrote:
> On Fri, 2015-05-15 at 14:08 +0200, Matthieu Moy wrote:
>> Pawel Por <porparek@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>> > At the beginning I'm sorry if this post is completely unrelated to
>> > this mailing list.
>> > I'm trying to find the base linux kernel version from which a patch
>> > has been created and posted to LKML.
>> > Most patches contain the index line. Is it the well known git index
>> > (staging area) ?
>>
>> This is the id of the blob object corresponding to the _file_ being
>> patched (index <from>..<to> <mode>). That's why you don't see it in git
>> log: git log shows you ids for commit objects (which point to trees,
>> which in turn points to blob).
>>
>> See Johannes' answer for how you can get some possible commits.
>>
> 
> Come to think of it, why is that line named "index"? Conceptually, this
> "diff header index" seems distinct from the "staging area index", but
> calling both "index" is confusing, in my opinion.
> 
> Is there already a note about this in the docs somewhere? At the very
> least, "git help diff" seems to happily use both senses of the word
> without any acknowledgement that we're overloading it.

By default, `git diff` works on the index, unless you force it to compare revisions or the working directory to a revision. I guess that is where the wording comes from.

In any case, it is too late to change it now...

Ciao,
Johannes