Re: Highly inconsistent diff UI

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Apr 24, 2013, 20:02 UTC
Message-ID: <7vli87bsu3.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20130424192339.GH29963@google.com>

Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:

Show 11 quoted lines

>> And it does not match "git log origin...HEAD" which gives both sides
>> of the symmetric difference of the history.  To match it, you have
>> to say "git log --right-only origin...HEAD" or something.
>
> I tend to use --left-right.  All I meant is that with both diff and
> log, ... is a way to get something meaningful when my history and
> someone else's history have diverged.
>
> I agree that it would be easier to explain if there were some
>
> 	git diff --from-merge-base A B

Yeah, I am not strongly opposed to have something like that, and having a shorter (but not a single letter) option name might make it more attractive than A...B at least to new users.

> We could say that "git diff A...B" is a mostly meaningless shorthand
> for that.

You may remember but this is not the first time we discussed that three-dot in log and diff mean different things.

Instead of saying "meaningless", I think in the past discussion the explanation given was that three-dot means different things between the context to specify a range (i.e. a symmetric difference) and the context to specify two endpoints (i.e. base and right end).

Which by the way is nothing new. "A" means the entire history leading to the commit "A" in the context of specifying a range, and the same "A" means a single commit "A" in the context of specifying a revision.