[PATCH 1/1] docs/git-blame: describe sourceline and resultline

From: Philip Patsch <philip@decentsoftwa.re>
Date: Oct 10, 2025, 15:21 UTC
Message-ID: <20251010152204.815520-2-philip@decentsoftwa.re>
In-Reply-To: <20251010152204.815520-1-philip@decentsoftwa.re>

The manpage did not make clean what source and resultlines refer to. This simple adjustment should remove that confusion.

Based on the question and answer on this Stackoverflow page: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49370690/what-is-sourceline-resultline-in-git-blame-incremental-output

Signed-off-by: Philip Patsch <philip@decentsoftwa.re>
---
 Documentation/git-blame.adoc | 9 +++++++--
 1 file changed, 7 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

diff --git a/Documentation/git-blame.adoc b/Documentation/git-blame.adoc
index e438d28625..870d0de0a5 100644
--- a/Documentation/git-blame.adoc
+++ b/Documentation/git-blame.adoc
@@ -113,8 +113,10 @@ In this format, each line is output after a header; the
 header at the minimum has the first line which has:
 
 - 40-byte SHA-1 of the commit the line is attributed to;
-- the line number of the line in the original file;
-- the line number of the line in the final file;
+- the line number of the line in the original file,
+  from when the commit was made;
+- the line number of the line in the final file,
+  from the current state of the file;
 - on a line that starts a group of lines from a different
   commit than the previous one, the number of lines in this
   group.  On subsequent lines this field is absent.
@@ -214,6 +216,9 @@ annotated.
 	<40-byte-hex-sha1> <sourceline> <resultline> <num-lines>
 +
 Line numbers count from 1.
++
+<sourceline> is where this line shows up in the original source commit.
+<resultline> is where this line shows up in the current state of the file.
 
 . The first time that a commit shows up in the stream, it has various
   other information about it printed out with a one-word tag at the

-- 
2.49.0