Re: [PATCH] diffcore-pickaxe doc: document -S and -G properly

Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com> writes:

There is nothing accidental about it. It was a very conscious design decision.

When a commit moves a file wholesale without affecting the block of code you are interested in, you know that whole block came from the file in the old tree at pre-rename location without looking at anywhere else. That is why renamed but pickaxe-uninteresting filepairs are dropped.

When a commit moves (some lines of) the block of code you are interested in from one file to another, it may have been a single instance moving to another place, but it may well have been multiple copies consolidated into one (the new copy, pickaxe digging from future to past may see "disappearing"). That is a significant event worth digging into further by first stopping there and then inspecting the whole change with --pickaxe-all to see what changes that are similar to the change in question exist in the other parts (notice the multiple) of the tree.

If you do not understand it, then you really should re-read $gmane/217 and then its explanation I wrote 4 years ago (both of which I already gave you URLs to in this thread).