Re: determine a linux kernel version of a patch file

From: Kelvin Li <ltwisabc@gmail.com>
Date: May 15, 2015, 17:03 UTC
Message-ID: <1431709433.1401.9.camel@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <vpqr3qicabd.fsf@anie.imag.fr>

On Fri, 2015-05-15 at 14:08 +0200, Matthieu Moy wrote:

Show 18 quoted lines

> Pawel Por <porparek@gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > Hi,
> >
> > 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.

Thanks, Kelvin