From: Linus Torvalds Date: Sun, 22 May 2005 19:05:24 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH] The diff-raw format updates. Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <20050522184237.GG18500@cip.informatik.uni-erlangen.de> On Sun, 22 May 2005, Thomas Glanzmann wrote: > > > - in all other cases: if the file is new, prepend a "+", if the file is > > old, prepend a "*", and if the file goes away, prepend a "-". In other > > words, the actual pathname (if it exists) always starts at the second > > character and is always prepended by _something_ (ie there is no > > ambiguoity with pathnames that start in -/+/*). > > I guess that this is only on human readable but not on the machine > format, right? The machine readable format has the same issue: it needs to be able to distinguish between a "copy" (where the source remains) and a "rename" (where the source is removed). So you still need the "*/-" thing, and then you're better off doing "+" and "/" too in the machine-readable format, to make the differences be as small as possible _and_ to avoid confusion if a pathname starts with '*' or '-'. Linus