Re: My patches

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Oct 18, 2013, 16:59 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqtxgewm4i.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <20131018153009.GA23704@thunk.org>

Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> writes:

Show 11 quoted lines

> Over the past 5+ years, I've observed that I
> think the way commit selection in "git format-patch" is inconsistent
> with how we handle commit selection for other commands, e.g., "git log
> <commit>" vs and "git format-patch <commit>".  Even if you think that
> this is a matter of self-inherent "truth", versus just a matter of
> taste, there is also the consideration of backwards compatibility, and
> the question of how important consistency and easy of learning gets
> traded off against backwards compatibility and invalidating
> potentially huge numbers of shell scripts and documentation.  So it's
> not something where I've made a nuisance of myself, because it's a
> settled issue.

The original syntax to select of commits by format-patch is very inconsistent from the log family because it was done way before the log family's way has been established as the best practice. It has annoyed enough people that we spent effort to teach recent Git to accept

	$ git format-patch master..next

as well.

So it indeed is a settled issue, but you are correct to point out that we had to find a way to do so while still keeping the original syntax working for people who have scripts and people who work from random and stale documents we have not much control over updating.