Re: [PATCH] show doc: redirect user to git log manual instead of git diff-tree

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Sep 6, 2023, 17:26 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqbkefnrgu.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <CAG1j3zFYbeXokd9kwN06RG7Wih_WsLVBf6jSi-JKtUpa=i4QJg@mail.gmail.com>

Han Young <hanyang.tony@bytedance.com> writes:

Show 8 quoted lines

>> Strictly speaking, "options to control how the changes are shown"
>> are options that are meant for "diff" command (e.g. "--stat", "-w"),
>> but "log" understands some of the "diff" command options, the
>> updated text is *not* incorrect.
>
> On a closer look, the manual page of git show does lists
> all the "diff" options by including diff-options.txt.
> The options omitted are revision parsing related.

The primary difference between "log" and "show" is that the latter is not about walking a range of commits. Both grok "diff" related options that control how the changes introduced by each commit are shown equally well. But in the context of "show", options that control revision traversal (i.e. which commits are chosen to be shown and in what order) do not make much sense.

So ...

Show 14 quoted lines

> Perhaps we remove the line
>
>> The command takes options applicable to the git diff-tree command to
>> control how the changes the commit introduces are shown.
>
> And rephrase the line
>
>> This manual page describes only the most frequently used options.
>
> to
>
>>  This manual page describes only the most frequently used options.
>> Some options that `git rev-list` command understands can be used to
>> control how commits are shown.

... I do not find the above an improvement.

Perhaps we should start with just "diff-tree" -> "log" and doing no other damage to the existing text. That will give us some baseline that is a strict improvement.

Thanks.