Re: Am able to delete a file with no trace in the log

On Wed, 3 Jun 2009, Jeff King wrote:

Well, that's the "--simplify-merges" part. 

It's just that our diff generation isn't very smart. We do show the commit, we just don't show a meaningful diff in that case.

And doing good diffs for a merge is _hard_. The "--cc" thing is supremely useful - it's just that it's useful for data conflicts, not for metadata issues.

It's in fact somewhat dubious if you actually want to see the file removal as a _diff_ in a merge, exactly because it's so verbose and yet often so uninteresting (ie the removal may well be intentional).

It might be that the right thing to do is to expand on "-c" and '--cc" to just give a summary of metadata changes.

Right now, "-c" and "--cc" ignore files that didn't change from one of the parents.

But maybe the right thing to do is to entirely ignore files only if they exist in all parents, but didn't change in one - and for things that have actual metadata changes, just say

 - exists in merge result, but not in parent 2:

   File 'x' was created in parent 1

 - does not exist in merge result, but exists in parent 1:

   File 'y' was deleted by parent 2

or similar (with perhaps even rename detection some day if -M is specified, although n-way rename detection is likely pretty painful).

IOW, do the whole "extended diff", but not actually show any diffs, just summary information, for new/deleted files in merges.

That would be enough of a hint to then use other tools to see the exact details of what happened..

			Linus