From: Matt McClure <matthewlmcclure@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2013 21:43:37 GMT
Subject: Re: difftool -d symlinks, under what conditions
Message-ID: <CAJELnLGBr1wOX4-3rCNjPpPLezc_6FgyeuPqty268JR0==qtvQ@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20130312210630.GF2317@serenity.lan>

On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 5:06 PM, John Keeping <john@keeping.me.uk> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 01:39:17PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>>
>> What is the situation when you do not want symbolic links?
>
> When you're not comparing the working tree.
>
> If we can reliably say "the RHS is the working tree" then it could be
> unconditional, but I haven't thought about how to do that - I can't see
> a particularly easy way to check for that;

Agreed. From what I can see, the only form of the diff options that
compares against the working tree is

    git difftool -d [--options] <commit> [--] [<path>...]

At first, I thought that the following cases were also working tree
cases, but actually they use the HEAD commit.

    git difftool -d commit1..
    git difftool -d commit1...

> is it sufficient to say
> "there is no more than one non-option to the left of '--' and '--cached'
> is not among the options"?

An alternative approach would be to reuse git-diff's option parsing
and make it tell git-difftool when git-diff sees the working tree
case. At this point, I haven't seen an obvious place in the source
where git-diff makes that choice, but if someone could point me in the
right direction, I think I'd actually prefer that approach. What do
you think?

--
Matt McClure
http://www.matthewlmcclure.com
http://www.mapmyfitness.com/profile/matthewlmcclure