From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Thu, 06 Oct 2005 14:35:58 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Fall back to three-way merge when applying a patch.
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0510060731560.31407@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <m1y8575i9y.fsf@ebiederm.dsl.xmission.com>



On Wed, 5 Oct 2005, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
>
> Ah.  I had missed that git-whatchanged can be given a filename that is
> nice.  One of the better kept secrets of git.  That makes my whole
> question worthwhile :)

That's definitely not a secret - it was part of the whole point of 
git-whatchanged. It's the native git version of "annotate", and I 
personally find it much more useful.

It's not even just a filename. You can do

	git-whatchanged -p drivers/scsi/ include/scsi

to limit the set to those two subdirectories. IOW, you can give 
git-whatchanged an arbitrary list of individual pathnames or directory 
names.

> But if you happen to have at least the file level sha1 you can
> actually know if the patch was against what you think it is against.

Yes, a file-level SHA1 may be useful. On the other hand, I suspect that by 
that time (since you have to search for the version anyway) you might as 
well have the "just try to apply the patch" approach. It's basically the 
same search space.

		Linus