Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> writes: > On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 02:19:52PM +0000, pedro rijo wrote: > >> Couldn't find any explanation on git docs on this issue: >> >> If I create a dummy commit, with some dummy diff, I get a normal patch >> when I run >> >> $ git format-patch -1 -o outgoing/ -p -k >> >> but if the last commit is an empty commit, generated by >> >> $ git commit --allow-empty "Some commit message" >> >> then the output of the format patch will be an empty patch. If the >> first case produces something like this: > > I'm not sure if this is a bug or not. > > In the beginning, git's revision-traversal machinery generally does not > show commits which have no diff. Over the years, commands like "git log" > learned to set the "always_show_header" option to show even empty > commits. But format-patch never did. The patch based workflow support is geared towards helping the recipient of the patches a lot more than the contributors, and to prevent mistakes while applying the patches, "am" would stop when it sees such an empty e-mail as you saw (in the later part of message I am not quoting). After all, a "format-patch" output that does not have any patch would be indistinguishable from discussion e-mail messages and the recipient would not want to end up with no-op commits that record such messages. So I think skipping no-op commit from the output was done pretty much deliberately and it is definitely not a bug. I however do not think it is incorrect to say that it is a lack of feature that nobody so far found necessary or beneficial. I would not refuse to consider adding a new option to "format-patch" to emit such a no-op message, and add a "having no patch is OK, just record a no-op commit" option to "am", though. But I do not see a clear benefit from such change--it sounds more like a set of "because we could" not "because we need to" changes to me. Thanks. -- 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