Re: git log FILE vs git log --follow FILE missing commits

From: Chris Packham <judge.packham@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 2, 2020, 21:53 UTC
Message-ID: <CAFOYHZAyYLdqUwkctL94T4fSPHj+FyMJqnWmkUu_g4=_wQJ9MQ@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20200202214243.GA1090206@alpha>

On Mon, Feb 3, 2020 at 10:42 AM Kevin Daudt <me@ikke.info> wrote:

Show 35 quoted lines

>
> On Mon, Feb 03, 2020 at 10:27:52AM +1300, Chris Packham wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I've just hit a problem where git log doesn't want to tell me about a
> > commit that touches a specific file.
> >
> > I wanted to point someone at a particular change that I knew was made
> > to a file so I fired up 'git log FILE' and to my surprise it wasn't
> > listed. I wondered if I had remembered wrong so went grepping to
> > confirm the change was in the file I thought it was, sure enough it
> > was there.
> >
> > Poking around a bit I found that git log --follow FILE shows the
> > intended commit but git log FILE doesn't (it does show other commits
> > that touch the file, most of which have tags if that's significant).
> > The file hasn't been renamed so I didn't really expect --follow to
> > change any behavior.
> >
> > The version of git I'm using is 2.25.0 from
> > http://ppa.launchpad.net/git-core/ppa/ubuntu bionic main. I also tried
> > 2.24.1 and 2.23.1 with the same problem.
> >
> > Any suggestions for tracking this down?
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Chris
>
> Hey Chris,
>
> Try `git log --full-history FILE`. When passing a path to `git log` will
> enable history simplification, which might explain why certain commits
> are not shown.
>
> Kind regards, Kevin.

Yes that shows the commit in question.

Based on the description of the default mode that actually makes sense. The change in question was a removal, but there was a merge of another branch that never contained the code that was removed. So the simplest history involves commits from the branch that never contained the change I was after.