Re: [PATCH RFC 0/5] Introduce git-blame-tree(1) command

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: May 14, 2025, 19:29 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqy0uz7zzh.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <874ixnjltf.fsf@iotcl.com>

Toon Claes <toon@iotcl.com> writes:

Show 7 quoted lines

>>> I thought you switch to blame-at-the-file-level only when you are
>>> given a directory (or a tree)?  "git blame path/to/file" has ALWAYS
>>> done "blame these lines that appear in this file", and cannot change.
>
> I don't know about that. What if you want to blame multiple files:
>
>   $ git blame-tree refs.c refs.h

I do not mind "multiple files mean blame-tree mode" as a yet another heuristics to tell which mode we are talking about, as "blame these lines" mode would take just one pathname to a blob and never a tree.

But the topic, IIRC, was about how "git blame" (with 'blame-tree' feature rolled into it) can tell which mode the request by the user is about. So you should have said "git blame refs.c refs.h" above.

> or (letting your shell do the globbing):
>
>   $ $ git blame-tree *.h

This one (with command name corrected) is questionable, as there could be a case where there is a single .h file, in which case, the command line would become "git blame that-single-header-file.h".

Again, I do not mind "even though I may have only a single blob specified on the command line, I want the blame-tree mode" command line option. So to recap

  $ git blame path-to-dir	 ;# blame-tree mode for paths in the directory
  $ git blame path1 path2        ;# blame-tree mode
  $ git blame path               ;# traditional blame-these-lines mode
  $ git blame --tree path        ;# blame-tree mode
  $ git blame --tree path1 path2 ;# blame-tree mode

would work fine.

Having said that, I personally do not think of what "blame-tree" does as "blame" at all, and there should be a better name for that operation that does not use "blame" or "annotate". So a separate command that does not even hint it has any relationship with "blame" (because it doesn't; in my mental model, it does not do any "blame" at all---it just does "git log -1 path" for many paths in parallel) would be even more preferrable.

Thanks.