Re: Confusion about diffing branches

On Mon, Aug 27, 2007 at 03:21:32PM +0200, Francis Moreau wrote:

That's not a major inconsistency problem IMHO because git diff does not take a set of commits, but rather two end points --- conceptually, there's no way to make sense out of trying to feed an arbitrary set of commitments to git-diff.

The bigger inconsistency is with git-format-patch, which *does* take a set of commits, and where "git-format-patch a" does operates on a very different set of commits than what what "git-rev-list a" returns. I understand that for backwards compatibility "git-format-patch a" is equivalent to "git-format-patch a..HEAD", but what it means is that all other ways of specifying sets of commits work with git-format-patch, *except* if you want to specify all commits from the beginning of time to a particular head (i.e., "git-rev-list a") is something that you simply can not possibly do using git-format-patch. This was mentioned on a blog entry as one of those "really confusing inconsistencies" in git.

						- Ted