[PATCH 0/2] better userdiff behavior for symlinks

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Sep 21, 2010, 20:59 UTC
Message-ID: <20100921205914.GA1166@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <20100921185613.GB28567@sigill.intra.peff.net>

On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 02:56:13PM -0400, Jeff King wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> We are again acting on the symlink's contents, which are a text
> pathname, as if they represented the content of that pathname.
> 
> So I think that is a bug, albeit one that is relatively uncommon to
> trigger. S_ISGITLINK files may have the same issues, but perhaps not,
> as I think they get routed out of the regular diff codepath early.

Here is a patch series to address this:

  [1/2]: diff: don't use pathname-based diff drivers for symlinks
  [2/2]: diff: add a special SYMLINK user-diff driver

The first one fixes the bug. The second one is similar to what I posted before, but it may actually be more useful now, as it re-enables some dubious functionality that the first patch dropped (but in a more sane way). See the comments in each patch for details.

-Peff