Re: Using Filemerge.app as a git-diff viewer
- From
- Toby White <tow21@cam.ac.uk>
- Date
- Nov 21, 2007, 13:10 UTC
- Message-ID
- <47442E57.8010004@cam.ac.uk>
- In-Reply-To
- <20071121112757.GA17231@sigill.intra.peff.net>
Jeff King wrote:
Show 12 quoted lines
> Have you looked at the documentation for GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF (try git(7))? > I think it is a cleaner way of doing what you want (although I think you > will get each file diffed individually, which is perhaps not what you > want). > > Something like: > > $ cat >merge.sh <<EOF > #!/bin/sh > opendiff "$1" "$2" > EOF > $ GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF=./merge.sh git-diff ...
I hadn't seen that, no, but that's not quite right. (Wincent pointed out its flaws better than me. Basically, opendiff is not really diff-like enough.)
And in any case, that launches Filemerge repeatedly on every file separately, which makes reviewing a large diff time-consuming and not very helpful.
> write-tree? Yikes. If you want to diff against the working tree, then do > that. If you want to diff against the index, then you probably want to > git-checkout-index to a tmpdir, and diff against that.
Am I misunderstanding the documentation? From man git-write-tree
"Conceptually, git-write-tree sync()s the current index contents into a set of tree files. In order to have that match what is actually in your directory right now, you need to have done a git-update-index phase before you did the git-write-tree."
So git-write-tree precisely does give you the index not the working tree, by my reading.
Show 5 quoted lines
>> git-archive --format=tar $OLD | (cd $TMPDIR1; tar xf -) > > Again, this could be simpler and faster by using git-checkout-index > (preceded by git-read-tree into a temp index, if you are comparing > against a tree).
Erm, ok, this is rapidly approaching the limit of my git knowledge, but while I can see git-read-tree will write a tree-ish into a temp index,
(so presumably git-read-tree --index-output=$TMPFILE <commit> ought to work. Except it doesn't, I get the error message fatal: unable to write new index file ),
I can't see how to make git-checkout-index read from a temp index.
And I'm assuming I don't want to go stomping all over the current index just in order to do a diff, which shouldn't change the state of my repository.
Is there a canonical way to checkout a given commit object into a fresh directory?
-- Dr. Toby O. H. White Dept. Earth Sciences, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EQ United Kingdom Tel: +44 1223 333464 Fax: +44 1223 333450 Web: http://uszla.me.uk