Re: [BUG] Highly inconsistent diff UI

Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com> writes:

The first thing to do is to eradicate "diff A..B" from the documentation, and a dozen or more lines in your complaint will go away with that single change.

As you know, diff is about two endpoints, and A..B is not a way to specify two endpoints, and not erroring it out whenever we see a negative revision is a mere courtesy to old timers who knew the command line parser was shared with rev-list machinery.

There is no reason to forbid the syntax, but encouraging its use is counterproductive and will lead to confusions to new people as you pointed out.

The only issue is to come up with a concise alternative way to express "diff A...B", perhaps "diff --compare-with-base A B", and then you can choose not to say anything but an object name (and no range notation) on the command line (if you do not "diff A...B", it can already be done by not using "diff A..B").