Re: git log --stat FILE

From: Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com>
Date: Aug 8, 2010, 13:08 UTC
Message-ID: <201008081508.53732.jnareb@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <yf9bp9ds2mz.fsf@chiyo.mc.pp.se>

Marcus Comstedt wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > Diffstat is just a diff format (a way of presenting diff); '--stat'
> > is described in "Common _diff_ options" of git-log(1) manpage.
> >
> > But whats obvious to me might not be obvious to everyone.
> 
> To me (and probably many others), a "diff" is the output of the
> command "/usr/bin/diff".  I notice that git seems to refer to this as
> a "patch" instead.  Nevertheless, the documentation of --full-diff
> explicitly talks about "log -p", rather than "diffs" in general.  So
> it's not clear from the documentation that it affects other types of
> diffs than those produced by -p ("patches").

To me (and probably many others), a "diff" is something that describe differences between two versions (compares two version). Note that 'GNU diff' (and other "/usr/bin/diff") supports three output formats: ed based, context and unified formats. git-diff supports patch format (unified, with some extensions), raw aka diff-tree format, and various versions of diffstat format.

The '--full-diff' is a git-log option, not diff option, as it affects how git-log uses path limiter. "git log -p <path>..." is an example of copmmand that shows diffs with commits, as "git log <path>..." alone doesn't show diffs (in any format). But perhaps the description of '--full-diff' option could be improved.

The '--stat' is git-diff option, as you can see by running e.g. "git diff --stat HEAD^!"

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland