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Re: Missing --relative documentation

From
Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date
May 10, 2018, 14:22 UTC
Message-ID
<20180510142242.GA25617@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To
<CALVfKe9K+qoDNXf1PbnvXWdYn-Vtv8xUJF-1PctC8uN1p4gyiA@mail.gmail.com>
On Fri, Apr 27, 2018 at 12:24:26PM -0500, kelly elton wrote:
> git format-patch is missing documentation for --relative.
> There is also no auto complete(or tab complete, whatever it's called)
> for the --relative switch/argument.

The missing documentation is due to the ancient d4cb003fff (format-patch documentation: Remove diff options that are not useful, 2009-11-07). Unfortunately I couldn't find any discussion on why those options were thought to be useless.

I assume the notion was that the point of format-patch is to generate full text patches for somebody else to apply, and thus something like --relative usually wouldn't make sense. I could see it being useful if you are doing something funny, though, like generating patches for a subset of the repository as if they were at the top level.

I'm not sure if it would make sense to add the option back to the documentation, though, since the point was to try to de-clutter the format-patch manpage. I wonder if we could say something like "this command supports all the diff options; see git-diff[1] for the full list".

-Peff
Previous: kelly elton
Message 2 of 2 in “Missing --relative documentation”
  1. kelly eltonApr 27, 2018
  2. Jeff KingMay 10, 2018

Read the whole thread, see it on lore, or plain text.

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