From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2016 18:21:16 GMT
Subject: Re: Can't diff against the 00000000 revision
Message-ID: <20160112182115.GB9244@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <87io2yekhp.fsf@igel.home>

On Tue, Jan 12, 2016 at 07:11:14PM +0100, Andreas Schwab wrote:

> Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:
> 
> > And hopefully that explains why "000000" does not necessarily make a
> > good placeholder for "the empty thing". There are multiple empty things,
> > and it is not clear what:
> >
> >   git diff 0000000 1234abcd
> >
> > means. Is 0000000 a tree? A blob?
> 
> Perhaps there should be an easy syntax for an empty thing, something
> like 0^{tree} and 0^{blob}.  Not sure whether it is worth the effort,
> though.

I think I proposed a magic EMPTY_TREE token or something like that at
one point. It is slightly more convenient than trying to remember the
exact tree sha1, but I think in practice it doesn't save much effort
(outside of scripts, you can often use "--root" to accomplish the same
thing, depending on the command being run).

-Peff