Thomas Rast wrote: > So (I think?) in the above you claim that $USER interprets > > git log -- README.md > > as > > Show me the history of README.md. > > But there's no such thing as the history of a file! I made no such claims. I might not know as much as you or the others on the list about git, but I can certainly grok how git stores history. There needs to be some amount of mutual respect for a healthy conversation: if you start assuming midway that I don't understand what history is, we have a problem. > So please don't write tests that go contrary to that definition, because > they're *wrong*. The current implementation precisely matches the > current definition of pathspec filtering. Who said anything about changing any definitions? Where are you getting all this from? How does "git log HEAD~3 -- README" work? It sets up a revision walk to start from HEAD~3 going all the way down to the root commit. In each of these commits, it looks for the entry "README" in the corresponding tree. It then runs diff-tree with the previous commit's tree to see if the object (blob) corresponding to the "README" entry is different: if so, it selects the commit and displays it. Now, what am I saying? I'm saying that this approach assumes that all trees are read into /. A pathspec "subproject/README" is _only_ present in the subtree-merge commit^{tree} and nowhere else. The current log algorithm might try to look for the entry "subproject/README" (your pathspec) in all the commit^{tree}s of the commits leading up to M^2. That is _not_ the problem, as I have already illustrated that --follow follows over merges. The problem is looking for the pathspec "subproject/README" in the first place: those commit^{trees}s have the entry stored as "README". Am I making any sense, or are you going to accuse me of not understanding trees now? -- 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