Re: Strange bug with "git log" - pdftotext?

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jul 30, 2018, 15:37 UTC
Message-ID: <20180730153731.GA25797@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <5B5F096A.7030404@game-point.net>

On Mon, Jul 30, 2018 at 01:49:46PM +0100, Jeremy Morton wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> I'm trying to search my git log history for a particular term -
> "unobtrusive" - so I run this command:
> 
> git log -S unobtrusive --oneline
> 
> When I do this, this is displayed and I'm in an interactive less terminal or
> something:
> 
> pdftotext version 4.00
> [...]

That's definitely weird.

My guess is that the repository has some .gitattributes set up to diff pdf files in a particular way, and you have some matching config that tries to call pdftotext.

What does:

  git config --list | grep ^diff

say? I'd expect to see an external or textconv option there running pdftotext.

Another option is that your pager is somehow set up to call pdftotext, but that seems much more nonsensical to use the tool there (but try "git var GIT_PAGER" and "git config pager.log" to check).

-Peff