Re: [GIT PULL] MFD for v3.19

[Lee Jones <lee.jones@linaro.org>]

On Tue, 09 Dec 2014, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 9, 2014 at 2:00 AM, Johan Hovold <johan@kernel.org> wrote:
> >
> > Not sure what happened to the git history after your merge, though,
> > since commit
> >
> >         b6684228726c ("mfd: viperboard: Fix platform-device id collision")
> >
> > no longer shows up when doing
> >
> >         git log origin/master -- drivers/mfd/viperboard.c
> 
> So when you do "git log" with a pathname specifier, git obviously no
> longer shows you all the history. In particular, it shows you the
> relevant history for just that file. And by "relevant", it not only
> skips commits that don't change the file, but it also does merge
> simplification: if it hits a merge, and all changes to the file came
> from one side of the merge, it will ignore the other side.
> 
> And in this case, since after my merge the file was identical to your
> branch, clearly the other side didn't bring anything interesting to
> the table, and that history simplification basically means that it's
> ignoring all the changes done in the other side of the merge that got
> thrown away and aren't really relevant for the end result.
> 
> You can get rid of that extra simplification with "--full-history",
> but then you'll usually also want to skip all the merges that aren't
> really intersting, so you'd usually end up doing "--full-history
> --no-merges" or something.
> 
> Thenm you'll see that commit that didn't actually matter fot the end result..

Interesting.  I know Git does some pretty amazing things, but I wasn't
aware it was capable of this kind of simplification when displaying
logs.  I would have expected it to display all commits pertaining to a
file if you'd specified it implicitly.  Thanks for clearing that up.

-- 
Lee Jones
Linaro STMicroelectronics Landing Team Lead
Linaro.org │ Open source software for ARM SoCs
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