[PATCH 1/3] doc: patch-id: emphasize multi-patch processing

From: kristofferhaugsbakk@fastmail.com <kristofferhaugsbakk@fastmail.com>
Date: Feb 7, 2026, 15:05 UTC
Message-ID: <multi-patch_processing.276@msgid.xyz>
In-Reply-To: <CV_doc_patch-id_4.275@msgid.xyz>

From: Kristoffer Haugsbakk <code@khaugsbakk.name>

Emphasize that you can pass multiple patches or diffs to this command.

git-patch-id(1) is an efficient pID–commit mapper, able to map thousands of commits in seconds. But discussions on the command seem to typically[1] use the standard loop-over-rev-list-and- shell-out pattern:

    for commit in rev-list:
        prepare a diff from commit | git patch-id

This is unnecessary; we can bulk-process the patches:

    git rev-list --no-merges <ref> |
         git diff-tree --patch --stdin |
         git patch-id --stable

The first version (translated to shell) takes a little over nine minutes for a commit history of about 78K commits.[2] The other one, by contrast, takes slightly less than a minute.

Also drop “the” from “standard input”.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/19758159 † 2: This is `master` of this repository on 2025-10-02

Signed-off-by: Kristoffer Haugsbakk <code@khaugsbakk.name>
---
 Documentation/git-patch-id.adoc | 7 ++++---
 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)

diff --git a/Documentation/git-patch-id.adoc b/Documentation/git-patch-id.adoc
index 013e1a61906..e95391cd255 100644
--- a/Documentation/git-patch-id.adoc
+++ b/Documentation/git-patch-id.adoc
@@ -3,7 +3,7 @@ git-patch-id(1)
 
 NAME
 ----
-git-patch-id - Compute unique ID for a patch
+git-patch-id - Compute unique IDs for patches
 
 SYNOPSIS
 --------
@@ -12,7 +12,7 @@ git patch-id [--stable | --unstable | --verbatim]
 
 DESCRIPTION
 -----------
-Read a patch from the standard input and compute the patch ID for it.
+Read patches from standard input and compute the patch IDs.
 
 A "patch ID" is nothing but a sum of SHA-1 of the file diffs associated with a
 patch, with line numbers ignored.  As such, it's "reasonably stable", but at
@@ -25,7 +25,8 @@ When dealing with `git diff-tree --patch` output, it takes advantage of
 the fact that the patch is prefixed with the object name of the
 commit, and outputs two 40-byte hexadecimal strings.  The first
 string is the patch ID, and the second string is the commit ID.
-This can be used to make a mapping from patch ID to commit ID.
+This can be used to make a mapping from patch ID to commit ID for a
+set or range of commits.
 
 OPTIONS
 -------

-- 
2.53.0.26.g2afa8602a26