Re: Retrieving a file in git that was deleted and committed

>>
>> On Thu, Dec 06, 2018 at 11:07:00PM -0800, biswaranjan panda wrote:
>>
> >> Thanks! Strangely git log --follow does work.
>>
>> I suspect it would work even without --follow. When you limit a log
>> traversal with a pathspec, like:
>>
>>   git log foo
>>
>> that is not about following some continuous stream of content, but
>> rather just applying that pathspec to the diff of each commit, and
>> pruning ones where it did not change. So even if there are gaps where
>> the file did not exist, we continue to apply the pathspec to the older
>> commits.

>
> On Thu, Dec 6, 2018 at 11:26 PM Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, Dec 06, 2018 at 11:07:00PM -0800, biswaranjan panda wrote:
> >
> > > Thanks! Strangely git log --follow does work.
> >
> > I suspect it would work even without --follow. When you limit a log
> > traversal with a pathspec, like:
> >
> >   git log foo
> >
> > that is not about following some continuous stream of content, but
> > rather just applying that pathspec to the diff of each commit, and
> > pruning ones where it did not change. So even if there are gaps where
> > the file did not exist, we continue to apply the pathspec to the older
> > commits.
>
> Ah, of course. Thanks for the clarification, Jeff. And my apologies to
> Biswaranjan Panda for the incorrect information.
>
> >
> > Tools like git-blame will _not_ work, though, as they really are trying
> > to track the content as they walk back through history. And Once all of
> > the content seems to appear from nowhere in your new commit, that seems
> > like a dead end.
> >
> > In theory there could be some machine-readable annotation in the commit
> > object (or in a note created after the fact) to say "even though 'foo'
> > is a new file here, it came from $commit:foo".  And then git-blame could
> > keep following the content there. But such a feature does not yet exist.
> >
> > -Peff