Re: Updated Kernel Hacker's guide to git

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Dec 22, 2006, 04:13 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0612212009370.3536@woody.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <87slf83erg.wl%cworth@cworth.org>

On Thu, 21 Dec 2006, Carl Worth wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

>
> On Thu, 21 Dec 2006 10:23:30 -0800 (PST), Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > In short, for git diff (and ONLY) git diff, all of these are the same:
> >
> > 	git diff a..b
> > 	git diff a b
> 
> I admit that I had had never passed a range of commits to git diff,
> nor even given any thought to what it might do, but I definitely find
> the above very surprising---and not necessarily very useful. Why is
> anyone ever typing those two dots here if they have no effect on the
> result?

I do it all the time, I never even use the old-fashioned syntax any more. It's much more concise and easy to read, and it has all the nice shortcuts (like empty meaning "HEAD", so you can do "git diff ..next" to see the diff from HEAD to another branch).

It's also useful exactly because of the semantics of things like "...".

In other words, sure, "git diff a b" works, but it just _looks_ more pleasing to use "a..b" and you mentally always pronounce the ".." as "to".

So "git diff a b" doesn't even look good to me any more, because it's literally missing that mental "to" that the ".." adds for me when I read it.

		Linus