Re: GIT 0.99.9

Btw, 
 one thing I'd like to see (maybe it already exists and I just have 
overlooked it) is some kind of simple readme or something about the 
different ways to limit the output of the various git commands.

I've several times been surprised to see people not realize that "git-whatchanged" takes a file list to limit the files it is interested in. I also suspect people don't realize that you can limit it by time and version and file list, all at the same time.

IOW, 

	git-whatchanged -p --pretty=short --since="2 weeks ago" v0.99.8..v0.99.9 Makefile

is a valid query: it basically asks for any change to the Makefile in between versions v0.99.8..v0.99.9, _and_ within the last two weeks, and asks to show it as a patch, with the shortened commit message.

Is it useful? The above exact line almost certainly isn't, but variations on the above definitely are. And I suspect a lot of people never even realized you could do something like that.

(The danger with date-based things is that something may be 4 months old, but it only got _merged_ yesterday, so it may be new to _you_. And the --since="2 weeks ago" will not show it, which can be surprising to people who expect things that are new to _them_ to be shown).

The above limiters now work with "git log" and "gitk" too (they've worked for a long time with "git-whatchanged", but only with the new git-rev-list functionality does the name-limiting work for the other commands).

It would be good to make this more well-known, because a lot of people probably end up using git not as developers, but just to follow what is going on. And then the different limiters are some of the most important parts (the date-one is likely the least important one, but limiting by version and name is _very_ important).

		Linus