Re: What should a user expect from git log -M -- file

From: Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com>
Date: Nov 26, 2009, 17:14 UTC
Message-ID: <m3ocmpmcoq.fsf@localhost.localdomain>
In-Reply-To: <20091126163654.GA14509@glandium.org>

Mike Hommey <mh@glandium.org> writes:

Show 8 quoted lines

> I recently reorganized a project of mine, and the result is that a lot of
> files moved from the top directory to a sub directory.
> 
> Now, I innocently tried to 'git log -M' some of these files in the
> subdirectories, and well, the history just stops when the file was
> created. Obviously, if I put both the old and the new location it works,
> but shouldn't users expect 'git log -M -- file' to try to find the
> previous path and continue from there ?

What you want is not

  git log -M -- file

but

  git log --follow file

"git log -M -- file" IIRC first applies path limiting, simplifying history, *then* does rename detection, and finally filters output (unless --full-diff is used).

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland
ShadeHawk on #git