On Sat, Mar 19, 2011 at 08:24:20PM +0100, MichaÅ Åowicki wrote: > I'm looking at idea about better git log --follow support from > https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/SoC2011Ideas .There is something > like this - "[.. ] it does not interact well with git's usual history > simplification [...]". Can someone elaborate this? I've found History > Simplification in git rev-list man but don't know yet about issues > with --follow. In short, history simplification is a way of looking at a subset of the commit history graph, but in a way that makes it look like a complete graph. Imagine I have a linear history like this: A--B--C where "A" modifies "file1", "B" modifies "file2", and "C" modifies "file1" again. If I ask for the history of "file1" with "git log file1", then git will pretend as if the graph looks like: A--C including rewriting the parent of "C" to point to "A" (because the parent pointer is basically an edge in the graph). If you are just doing a straight "git log", the actual parentage is not that interesting. We either show commits or we don't, and we don't show links between them. But try "git log --graph" or "gitk", which do care about the edges. They want to show you a whole connected graph. Now consider --follow. It doesn't happen during the commit limiting phase, but instead it happens while we're showing commits. And if it decides a commit isn't interesting, we don't show it. That works OK for "git log", but it makes the graph for other things disjointed. You can see it in this example: # make the A-B-C repo we mentioned above git init repo && cd repo echo content >file1 && git add file1 && git commit -m one echo content >file2 && git add file2 && git commit -m two echo content >>file1 && git add file1 && git commit -m three # Now look at it in gitk; we see a nice linear graph. gitk # Now let's try it with path limiting. We see a nice subgraph that # pretends to be linear, because we "squished" out the uninteresting # nodes. gitk file1 # Now let's make some more commits with a rename. echo content >>file2 && git commit -a -m four git mv file1 newfile && git commit -m five echo content >>newfile && git commit -a -m six # If we use path limiting, we'll only see the two most recent commits. # We get stopped at the rename because path limiting is just about the # pathname. gitk newfile # So we can use --follow to follow the rename. First let's try simple # output. You should see commits 1, 3, 5, and 6, which touched either # newfile or its rename source, file1. git log --oneline --follow newfile # But now look at it in gitk. Commit 4 is included as a boundary # commit, but we fail to notice that it connects to three. And we # don't see commit 3 connecting to anything, and commit 1 is missing # entirely. gitk --follow newfile Obviously this a pretty simplistic example. But you can imagine in a history with a lot of branching how useful this simplification is to understanding what happened to a subset of the tree. Jakub mentioned another example with gitweb's subtree merge not being found by --follow. I haven't looked into that case, but it may be related (or it may simply be a defect in follow finding the right source). -Peff -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html