Re: Retrieving a file in git that was deleted and committed

On Thu, Dec 06, 2018 at 11:07:00PM -0800, biswaranjan panda wrote:

I suspect it would work even without --follow. When you limit a log traversal with a pathspec, like:

  git log foo

that is not about following some continuous stream of content, but rather just applying that pathspec to the diff of each commit, and pruning ones where it did not change. So even if there are gaps where the file did not exist, we continue to apply the pathspec to the older commits.

Tools like git-blame will _not_ work, though, as they really are trying to track the content as they walk back through history. And Once all of the content seems to appear from nowhere in your new commit, that seems like a dead end.

In theory there could be some machine-readable annotation in the commit object (or in a note created after the fact) to say "even though 'foo' is a new file here, it came from $commit:foo". And then git-blame could keep following the content there. But such a feature does not yet exist.

-Peff