Re: Formatting options are ignored when tracking functions

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: May 23, 2021, 18:11 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqczthnwuu.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <EE7D39E6-D826-49E2-AD0E-090A83DFDEC1@gmail.com>

Philippe Blain <levraiphilippeblain@gmail.com> writes:

Show 5 quoted lines

> I believe this is working as advertised: only the first line of
> the commit message is shown.
> However as mentioned in the doc, the -L option also triggers patch
> output (-p), which you can omit if you explicitely add --no-patch
> (or shorter, -s).

Heh, I think "working as advertised" is not wrong per-se, but this feels like a clear design mistake to me, at least at the UI level. Admittedly, I've never used "log -L" in scripts and I've always used it interactively, in a context that I want to see the patch output, so this did not bother me so far.

But what commits -L decides have relevant changes and how these commits are shown ought to be orthogonal. It surely may need to run the content-level diff machinery to see if each commit affects the area of the code specified via the -L option, but just like "git log -S<text>" can be used to find commits that change the number of occurrences of <text>, and allows the users to choose to view them with "-p" (but not force the --patch mode on), it should behave the same way, I would think.

With a clear migration plan, we should be able to fix this over time, I would think.