Re: [PATCH 2/3] Introduce rename factorization in diffcore.

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Nov 7, 2008, 21:11 UTC
Message-ID: <7vskq3fdgz.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20081107203952.GJ5158@nan92-1-81-57-214-146.fbx.proxad.net>

Yann Dirson <ydirson@altern.org> writes:

Show 7 quoted lines

> On Fri, Nov 07, 2008 at 12:19:14PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>> I am afraid that this is totally unacceptable, as you yourself mentioned,
>> the end result is unapplicable with any existing tool and would confuse
>> viewers like gitk and gitweb.
>
> Well, other tools will still have to be taught about a new syntax, if
> they're going to use the new flag - just like it was for --rename.

You are mistaken. For a patch, you are dealing with two different parties: producer and consumer. If you are adding new feature to the producer, the output format should be desigend to allow the consumer tell that it is something it does not know how to handle.

Marking a non patch with "diff --git" to trigger the logic to signal the beginning of a patch to git-apply (and perhaps other tools) is a non starter.

And for this "we are giving a patch that your git-apply can apply and gitk can show, but by the way we also think the whole directory foo moved to new location bar" is merely an additional information. You should still be able to apply the patch with tools that are unaware of this new directory move detection feature.