Re: [PATCH] git log [diff-tree options]...

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Apr 9, 2006, 19:02 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0604091158310.9504@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <7vbqvabn8f.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

On Sun, 9 Apr 2006, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

> 
> Also, I might have to rethink --max-count logic -- I think it is
> reasonable to skip the commit when doing limiting by diff like
> "whatchanged" does, but one thing I find suboptimal with the
> current whatchanged is that it does not count commits that are
> actually shown (it counts what the upstream rev-list feeds
> diff-tree).  With the "git log --diff" based whatchanged, it
> becomes trivial to skip the revs->max_count limiting and have
> the caller count the commits it actually does something
> user-visible to, instead of counting the commits it pulled out
> of get_revision().

Well, on the other hand, the new "git log --diff" should get the revision counting right even if it's _not_ done by the caller.

Really, the only reason "git-whatchanged" exists at all is that it used to be originally impossible, and later on too expensive to do the commit- limiting by pathname. With the new incremental path-limiting, the reason for "git-whatchanged" simply goes away.

So I'd suggest:
 - drop git-whatchanged entirely
 - keep it - for historical reasons - as a internal shorthand, and just 
   turn it into "git log --diff -cc"

and everybody will be happy (yeah, it will show a few merge commits without diffs, because the diffs end up being uninteresting, but that's _fine_, even if it's not 100% the same thing git-whatchanged used to do)

			Linus