Re: Remove old forgotten command: whatchanged

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Aug 8, 2013, 19:27 UTC
Message-ID: <7v1u649e5m.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <vpqk3jwcb1q.fsf@anie.imag.fr>

Matthieu Moy <Matthieu.Moy@grenoble-inp.fr> writes:

Show 18 quoted lines

> Damien Robert <damien.olivier.robert+gmane@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Matthieu Moy  wrote in message <vpqfvukdy39.fsf@anie.imag.fr>:
>>>> that confuses users.
>>> 
>>> ... but I do agree that the doc is really confusing. It would be much
>>> better if the doc could be reduced to:
>>> 
>>> "This is a synonym for linkgit:git-log[1] --raw --some --other ---options.
>>> Please refer to the documentation of that command."
>>
>> If I may chime in as a user: what really confused me about git whatchanged
>> is this part of man gitcore-tutorial:
>
> Indeed.
>
> How about applying this, to reduce the number of references to
> whatchanged in the docs?

I fully agree with the change to git.txt

I am slightly negative about the rest.

gitcore-tutorial is about teaching people who want to script around plumbing to do their own Porcelain. It is *not* about teaching them "if you want to see the history, use 'git log'".

It is meant to teach them "if you want to do your own 'git log', you can do so with 'rev-list' piped to 'diff-tree --stdin'". Changing 'whatchanged' to 'log' in the latter statement is an improvement, but dropping 'can be done by combining rev-list and diff-tree' goes against the objective of the whole document.

If we were to be spending more braincycles to update the latter, I think we should enrich it by finding ways to resurrect good examples that were lost over time due to "rewrite in C and make them builtin" process.

Show 40 quoted lines

> diff --git a/Documentation/git.txt b/Documentation/git.txt
> index 3bdd56e..486a58b 100644
> --- a/Documentation/git.txt
> +++ b/Documentation/git.txt
> @@ -818,7 +818,7 @@ for further details.
>  'GIT_FLUSH'::
>         If this environment variable is set to "1", then commands such
>         as 'git blame' (in incremental mode), 'git rev-list', 'git log',
> -       'git check-attr', 'git check-ignore', and 'git whatchanged' will
> +       'git check-attr', and 'git check-ignore' will
>         force a flush of the output stream after each record have been
>         flushed. If this
>         variable is set to "0", the output of these commands will be done
> diff --git a/Documentation/gitcore-tutorial.txt b/Documentation/gitcore-tutorial.txt
> index f538a87..c6a1677 100644
> --- a/Documentation/gitcore-tutorial.txt
> +++ b/Documentation/gitcore-tutorial.txt
> @@ -532,12 +532,7 @@ commit, and you can tell it to show a whole series of diffs.
>  Alternatively, you can tell it to be "silent", and not show the diffs at
>  all, but just show the actual commit message.
>  
> -In fact, together with the 'git rev-list' program (which generates a
> -list of revisions), 'git diff-tree' ends up being a veritable fount of
> -changes. A trivial (but very useful) script called 'git whatchanged' is
> -included with Git which does exactly this, and shows a log of recent
> -activities.
> -
> +'git log' can also be used to display changes introduced by some commits.
>  To see the whole history of our pitiful little git-tutorial project, you
>  can do
>  
> @@ -550,7 +545,7 @@ with the associated patches use the more complex (and much more
>  powerful)
>  
>  ----------------
> -$ git whatchanged -p
> +$ git log --raw -p
>  ----------------
>  
>  and you will see exactly what has changed in the repository over its