Puzzled by gitk patch representation for merge commits

Jerome Lovy· Jul 4, 2008, 09:14 UTC · lore

Hello,

I don't understand the graphical scheme that gitk uses when displaying patches for merge commits. I would like to be able to explain this to the people I'm trying to evangelize to git, because they are also puzzled when they try to check with gitk what a merge has done to a given file.

I can see that at least three graphical hints seem to be involved:
- font: regular/bold
- color: red/blue
(maybe there are more colors when the commit has more than two parents?)
- column for displaying the '+' or '-'

But I just don't see what is the respective semantics of these hints...

(I'm using git 1.5.5.1 if that matters.)

Thanks in advance, Jérôme

Jonathan Nieder· Jul 4, 2008, 17:51 UTC · re: Jerome Lovy · lore

Re: Puzzled by gitk patch representation for merge commits

Hi Jérôme,

Jerome Lovy wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> I don't understand the graphical scheme that gitk uses when displaying
> patches for merge commits. I would like to be able to explain this to the
> people I'm trying to evangelize to git, because they are also puzzled when
> they try to check with gitk what a merge has done to a given file.
> 
> I can see that at least three graphical hints seem to be involved:
> - font: regular/bold
> - color: red/blue
> (maybe there are more colors when the commit has more than two parents?)
> - column for displaying the '+' or '-'

All of the information is there in the text; the color and font are just supposed to make it easier to see. As for the diff text itself, I didn't remember what it meant myself, so I looked it up.

It seems the diff format shown is that produced by 'git-diff --cc', which makes a "compact combined diff". It only shows conflicting changes. Each column on the left represents the changes from a different parent.

Hope that helps, Jonathan