Re: Git log follow question

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: May 25, 2010, 09:31 UTC
Message-ID: <20100525093140.GA32460@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.2.00.1005140730030.3711@i5.linux-foundation.org>

On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 07:50:26AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

> I'm pretty sure I mentioned about this exact issue when I posted the 
> original follow patches, and it basically boils down to: "--follow" is a 
> total hack, and does _not_ use the regular commit filtering function, and 
> as a result, fancy things like "--parent" don't really work well with it.
>
> [...]
>
> And no, I'm unlikely to look at it. Sorry. I have used --follow 
> occasionally, but it's a hack to see "ok, there it got renamed". It would 
> be nice if "gitk --follow <pathname>" worked properly, but it's just not 
> something I care very much about.

Thanks for the input. I took a look at it myself and it is a bit more complex than just turning on pruning. I have a prototype --follow that handles arbitrary pathspecs instead of single files; instead of replacing the single-file pathspec, it just widens the pathspec as it traverses history. That eliminates some of the issues, but I am still getting some odd results from --parents.

So I am giving up for now, as it is not something I care that much about, either (though multiple-file --follow is). However, Bo Yang, one of the GSoC students, is planning on working on it as part of his line-level history browsing project. So we'll see what comes of that.

-Peff