Re: [RFC] git blame-tree

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Mar 2, 2011, 18:07 UTC
Message-ID: <20110302180722.GA20287@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTim4fKO=Lb0dY0DzRu1QqC8NHPoF8iveYQ2E6OBH@mail.gmail.com>

On Wed, Mar 02, 2011 at 06:51:57PM +0100, Piotr Krukowiecki wrote:

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> On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 6:16 PM, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:
> > I considered making it a special mode of "git blame" when blame is fed a
> > directory instead of a file. But the implementations aren't shared at
> > all (nor do I think they need to be; blame-tree is _way_ simpler). And I
> 
> git blame dir/file.c
>   "Show what revision and author last modified each line of a file"
> 
> git blame dir/
>   "Show what revision and author last modified each file"

Right, I think we are agreeing.

> This makes sense to me (the user).  I don't understand the
> implementation thing. I don't see a difference between those two
> commands. Even more, if I'm educated  Unix user I might know
> directories are also files.

I mean the implementations are very different, so there was not much point in putting the code into builtin/blame.c.

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> > didn't want to steal that concept in case somebody can think of a more
> > content-level way of blaming a whole tree that makes sense (obviously
> > just showing the concatenation of the blames of each file is one way,
> > but I don't know how useful that would be). If we want to go that way,
> > we can always catch the special case in blame and just exec blame-tree.
> 
> Still can be in git-blame command, no?

Right. What I meant was that we don't have to make the decision now. If people like blame-tree, we can later magically turn:

  git blame dir

into "git blame-tree dir". So I think we are just agreeing.

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> > The initial set of interesting files we come up with is gotten by
> > looking at the tree of the first pending object after parsing the rev
> > options (defaulting to HEAD). Which sounds a little flaky to me, but
> > does what you want in practice. I'd be curious if somebody can come up
> > with a counterexample where the ability to manually specify the source
> > tree would be more useful.
> 
> Same argument as for normal blame: I want to know who modified files at
> the state of commit X (if I understand the question correctly).

Yeah, that's what it does now. Specifically I was wondering about more elaborate examples, like:

  git blame-tree dir branch1 branch2

It will traverse using both branch1 and branch2, but get the initial list of files from branch1. I guess we could also union those trees or something. But I expect most calls to be:

  git blame-tree dir commit

and that's it.

-Peff