Puzzled by gitk patch representation for merge commits

Puzzled by gitk patch representation for merge commits

[Jerome Lovy]

Hello,

I don't understand the graphical scheme that gitk uses when displaying 
patches for merge commits. I would like to be able to explain this to 
the people I'm trying to evangelize to git, because they are also 
puzzled when they try to check with gitk what a merge has done to a 
given file.

I can see that at least three graphical hints seem to be involved:
- font: regular/bold
- color: red/blue
(maybe there are more colors when the commit has more than two parents?)
- column for displaying the '+' or '-'

But I just don't see what is the respective semantics of these hints...

(I'm using git 1.5.5.1 if that matters.)

Thanks in advance,
Jérôme

Re: Puzzled by gitk patch representation for merge commits

[Jonathan Nieder]

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Hi Jérôme,

Jerome Lovy wrote:

> I don't understand the graphical scheme that gitk uses when displaying
> patches for merge commits. I would like to be able to explain this to the
> people I'm trying to evangelize to git, because they are also puzzled when
> they try to check with gitk what a merge has done to a given file.
> 
> I can see that at least three graphical hints seem to be involved:
> - font: regular/bold
> - color: red/blue
> (maybe there are more colors when the commit has more than two parents?)
> - column for displaying the '+' or '-'

All of the information is there in the text; the color and font are just
supposed to make it easier to see.  As for the diff text itself, I
didn't remember what it meant myself, so I looked it up.

It seems the diff format shown is that produced by 'git-diff --cc',
which makes a "compact combined diff".  It only shows conflicting
changes.  Each column on the left represents the changes from a
different parent.

Hope that helps,
Jonathan