Re: [PATCH] Documentation/git-diff: remove -r from --name-status example

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jul 29, 2007, 04:48 UTC
Message-ID: <7vbqdvolww.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.0.999.0707282119010.3442@woody.linux-foundation.org>

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> writes:

Show 20 quoted lines

>> Does anybody else find this behavior confusing? I can understand why
>> diff-tree might not recurse by default, but I wonder if porcelain like
>> git-diff should try to be a little more consistent and always recurse.
>
> I do agree.
>
> The behaviour is obviously historical, and comes from "git diff" being 
> just a shell-script wrapper around the different versions of diffing trees 
> and indexes etc.
>
> So it makes sense in that historical setting (and realizing that the 
> "HEAD<->index" and "index<->files" cases were really a totally different 
> operations), but it makes no sense in the modern world where people don't 
> even *know* about "git diff-tree", but just use "git diff" for everything.
>
> So:
>
>> Something like:
>
> Ack. Patch looks fine, makes sense, and is obviously good.

That makes it two of us. ... eh, excuse me, there is one issue I mention at the end.

> It *is* a change in behaviour, though, so I can understand if Junio 
> doesn't think it's appropriate this late in the 1.5.3 series.

One minor objection I do have is that, just as a matter of principle, in order to avoid setting precedence of making a fundamental semantics change in late -rc stage in the game, we should not swallow it. I do not mind if this were clearly a good change.

However, I think Jeff's patch always makes it recursive even when the user asks for --raw, which makes it inappropriate for inclusion whether before or after 1.5.3.