Re: Output from "git blame A..B -- path" for the bottom commit is misleading

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: May 9, 2014, 15:29 UTC
Message-ID: <20140509152935.GD18197@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <87zjiro856.fsf@fencepost.gnu.org>

On Fri, May 09, 2014 at 07:04:05AM +0200, David Kastrup wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> Arguably if the user explicitly limited the range, he knows what he's
> looking at. Admittedly, I don't know offhand which options _will_
> produce boundary commit indications: there may be some without explicit
> range limitation, and we might also be talking about limiting through
> shallow repos (git blame on a shallow repo is probably a bad idea in the
> first place, but anyway).

Yes, I was thinking mostly of "X..Y" types of ranges, which are probably the most common. I hadn't considered shallow repositories, and you can also hit the root commit as a boundary if you do not specify --root.

I guess the question still in my mind is: what use does the identity of the boundary commit have? That is, whether you know ahead of time where the boundary is or not, is there ever a case where knowing its author and/or commit sha1 is a useful piece of information, as opposed to knowing that we hit a boundary at all?

I could not think of one, but I may simply lack imagination.

-Peff