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.

>
> 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