Peter Baumann <Peter.B.Baumann@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
writes:
> One question, what's the difference between git-log -p and
> git-whatchanged -p?
> ...
> As you can see, the root commit isn't shown. Is this intentional?
Some historical background.
The traditional command do do log-minded things was whatchanged
and it was implemented as
git rev-list $revision_args -- $path_limits |
git diff-tree --stdin --pretty -r $format_args
and whatchanged did not give --root to diff-tree by default.
And 'diff-tree' does not show --pretty logs when there is no
diff to be shown (which still is true today and is a useful
behaviour), hence no mention of the root commit.
On the other hand, "git-log" traditionally looked like this:
git rev-list --pretty $revision_args
Back then, there was no path_limits nor even diff options to
it.
Later, Linus (with help from others) made the revision walk
machinery as callable inside programs other than "rev-list",
eliminating the need to pipe rev-list into diff-tree to perform
log-minded things. That enriched what "git log" can do, and
mostly made "whatchanged" a redundant command. As you may have
noticed, there isn't much difference between these two commands
in builtin-log.c; their differences are solely what default
options for diff and revision machinery are used and are meant
to match the traditional behaviour of these commands.
So there shouldn't be any differences, really, when you override
their defaults with the likes of -p.
Honestly speaking, I do not think there was _any_ consciously
designed intention to handle root commits, either to make these
commands behave identically or differently; regarding parentless
commits, they just behave the way they happen to behave, because
root commits were not something either Linus nor I were
interested in.
Given the recent discussion, however, the intention now should
be that Porcelain level commands should default to do --root
(i.e. when asked to do "diff" to show how a commit without a
parent differs from its nonexistent parent, show diff with
emptiness).
-
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