[PATCH v6] diff format documentation: clarify --cc and -c
- From
Adam Monsen <haircut@gmail.com>
- Date
- Mar 8, 2011, 21:03 UTC
- Message-ID
- <1299618236-17933-1-git-send-email-haircut@gmail.com>
- In-Reply-To
- <7vmxl5e6ur.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
The description was unclear if -c or --cc was the default (--cc is for some commands), and incorrectly implied that the default applies to all diff generating commands.
Most importantly, "log" does not default to "--cc" (it defaults to "--no-merges") and "log -p" obeys the user's wish to see non-combined format. Only "diff" (during merge and three-blob comparison) and "show" use --cc as the default.
The genesis of this patch was me getting frustrated trying to find changes hidden in conflict resolutions of a merge commit. Jeff King proposed a documentation fix. I made it into a patch, and worked on it with Junio. See the thread "frustrated forensics: hard to find diff that undid a fix" on the git mailing list:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/168481
For more historical information about viewing merge conflict resolutions, see this post by Linus from 2008:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/89415
Signed-off-by: Adam Monsen <haircut@gmail.com> ---
Please ignore v5. I forgot to include links to mailing list archives in that version.
Documentation/diff-generate-patch.txt | 11 +++++++---- 1 files changed, 7 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)
diff --git a/Documentation/diff-generate-patch.txt b/Documentation/diff-generate-patch.txt index 3ac2bea..c57460c 100644 --- a/Documentation/diff-generate-patch.txt +++ b/Documentation/diff-generate-patch.txt @@ -74,10 +74,13 @@ separate lines indicate the old and the new mode. combined diff format -------------------- -"git-diff-tree", "git-diff-files" and "git-diff" can take '-c' or -'--cc' option to produce 'combined diff'. For showing a merge commit -with "git log -p", this is the default format; you can force showing -full diff with the '-m' option. +Any diff-generating command can take the `-c` or `--cc` option to +produce a 'combined diff' when showing a merge. This is the default +format when showing merges with linkgit:git-diff[1] or +linkgit:git-show[1]. Note also that you can give the `-m' option to any +of these commands to force generation of diffs with individual parents +of a merge. + A 'combined diff' format looks like this: ------------
-- 1.7.2.3