Re: What should I do to display the diff of even a simple merge commit?

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Feb 10, 2010, 00:05 UTC
Message-ID: <7v1vguuf8h.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20100209235707.GQ9553@machine.or.cz>

Petr Baudis <pasky@suse.cz> writes:

Show 12 quoted lines

>   I'm not sure if there is any clever switch for this, but I usually
> just use one of
>
> 	git diff mergecommit^1 mergecommit
> 	git diff mergecommit^2 mergecommit
>
> depending on which parent I want the diff against. If you always do your
> merges as "on mainline, merging in a topic" without fast-forwarding,
> diff against the first parent will be probably the right one and you can
> simply use:
>
> 	git diff mergecommit^ mergecommit

Frankly, we should make "git log --first-parent -p" DTRT, I think.

The attitude towards merges we maintain officially is "all parents are equal", but in practice, there often are cases where --first-parent traversal makes a lot more sense when browsing the history (especially "the official" one). The use of that option should be a clear enough sign that diff between the first parent and the merge result is asked for.