Re: master^ is not a local branch -- huh?!?

From: Ron Garret <ron1@flownet.com>
Date: Jan 29, 2010, 23:30 UTC
Message-ID: <ron1-D69CAB.15304829012010@news.gmane.org>
In-Reply-To: <7vk4v0fqts.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

In article <7vk4v0fqts.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>,
 Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> Ron Garret <ron1@flownet.com> writes:
> 
> > My actual use case is very complicated, but here's a simplified version:
> >
> > Suppose I'm using git as a back-end for a wiki.  I want to look at the 
> > state of the entire wiki as it was in some point in the past, and I also 
> > want to be able to look at the diffs between individual pages as they 
> > were then and as they are now.
> 
> Don't think you are so special ;-)

Never.  :-)

> "git checkout $that_old_commit" was
> invented _exactly_ for that use case.  You can look around from that
> state, and when you are done sightseeing, you can come back by doing a
> "git checkout master" (or whichever branch you want to be on).

Yes, that's what I would have expected. Except that it not only updates my working tree, it updates my head also, so git diff doesn't give me the diffs that I want. (This makes sense for the usual use case.)

Show 7 quoted lines

> You don't necessarily have to check out an old state if the only thing
> you are interested in is to review how the contents changed over time.
> Use "git log -p" (from the current tip) for that.
> 
> If you chose to have an old checkout and then traverse the changes over
> time leading to the current tip, you would say "git log -p ..master"
> instead.

There's also this:

git rev-list HEAD -- [filename]

git ls-tree [some-hash-from-the-list-above]

Then for each line in the result:

git cat-file blob [hash] > [filename]

which seems like a horrible hack, but actually does what I want.

rg