Re: path limiting broken

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Apr 16, 2006, 18:27 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0604161117360.3701@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.63.0604162006050.19560@wbgn013.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de>

On Sun, 16 Apr 2006, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

> 
> There's another reason it does not show it. ATM, you have to add "-p" to 
> the command line, or "-c" will not show *any* patch, let alone a combined 
> one.

Oh, it will show the "raw" patch, which is often very useful. I've grown quite fond of it, because it shows what happened on a bigger level, without showing the details within a file ("--name-status" makes it more readable, but I'm too lazy to type it, so I often just look at the raw git patch).

> Thanks for all your help, but in this case it was not irrelevant. Because 
> I *had* the function in my working copy. And I had changed it. So I had to 
> find out where to move the change.

Right, but it was irrelevant as far as "top-of-head" was concerned (which is all that "git log" shows you - it doesn't care about your working tree).

The fact that it _had_ been relevant in the state you used to be at is not something "git log" and friends know or care about.

Now, I'm not disputing that we might want to make it easier to see what _had_ been relevant at some earlier time. But you'd have to specify that earlier time somehow. I assume you had tried to do a "git rebase", and the problem with that is that git rebase really doesn't help you at all when things go wrong, exactly because "rebase" - by design - screws up the history and loses that information for you.

If your problem state had been as a result of a "git merge", you'd actually have had much better tools available to you, exactly because merge doesn't screw up history, so you've got both sides of the merge you can look at (HEAD and MERGE_HEAD, and "git diff --ours" and "--theirs").

That said, even "rebase" will help somewhat. You've got "ORIG_HEAD" to use, and that should help at least a _bit_. In particular, you can do

	gitk ORIG_HEAD..

to see all the changes you rebased across. But right now you'd have to fall back on the "-m -p" thing if you wanted to see it all..

		Linus