Re: RFC: Change whatchanged to report changes from merges by default?

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Dec 20, 2008, 20:09 UTC
Message-ID: <7vvdtewqvy.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20081220104232.5ff1b7c0@crow>

Mark Burton <markb@ordern.com> writes:

> Is it just an accident of history or by design that whatchanged
> requires the -m option to show changes introduced by merges but
> diff and git log show those changes without requiring any extra
> options?

Mostly personal preference and inertia..

I personally do not see any reason for anybody to use whatchanged (what a long single-word to type!) since around git version v1.0.0 or so. Back then, whatchanged was a good way to satisfy "I want a quick sanity check, but I want to see a bit more than just names of files to assure me. But I want to get that without actually running the diffs or stats because I consider that anything that takes more than half a second is too expensive." But ever since we made the diff generation built-in, the performance objection ceased to be an issue. These days I'd imagine that "log --name-only" or even "log --stat" would be perfectly acceptable and easier to explain alternative, especially if you happen to be a very early adopter whose fingers are trained to type "whatchanged".

IOW, I consider "whatchanged" a command that is kept only for old timers' sake. There is no reason to promote it, but there is no reason to deprecate it, either. Which means the answer to this question...

> Would it not make more sense to have git whatchanged show the changes
> introduced by merges by default and then people can use the (already
> supported) --no-merges option to suppress that behaviour?

... is a NO spelled in capital letters.