I feel like you got hung up too much on exact wording of what I was trying to describe. I do apologize I don't have the background to explain things 100% accurately, especially at a low level. My explanations are mostly intended to be as a user, based on what is observable, and based on intent. I'll clarify in the quotes below... On Fri, May 3, 2019 at 2:12 PM Eckhard Maaß <eckhard.s.maass@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hold on. Basically, there is no such thing as "committed directly" for a > merge. You only have differences of the commit to its parents. What you > aim for are changes that you cannot find in either preimage - and this > can be observed best with the --cc option. Maybe also interesting would > be -c for showing a comined diff and -m for showing diffs to parents > after one another. "Committed directly" here means that I made some changes, none of which is part of a parent commit. Since no additional commits were made following the merge, I assume that within the merge commit is some type of diff. If I perform a merge, make some changes, and amend those changes into the merge, in mind they ARE contained in that merge commit. The underlying machinery doesn't matter here: This is the observable state to the user. Maybe the machinery, which I have no knowledge of or transparency into, is important because it is affecting the behavior I'm seeing when I do the diffs? Not sure... > There shouldn't be "just the diff of <commit>" - you always have to tell > where to diff it too, intrinsically Git does not save patches, but the > whole content, after all. I do understand this. But again, I'm not trying to be super technical here. In plain english, all I'm trying to say is that I want to see the changes that 1 commit introduces into the code base. So when it comes to communicating the end result I want, I talk about it in terms of 1 commit (the merge commit). The means to get that output is part of my question and overall confusion. But as a baseline, I want to clarify that I do understand a range is required input for the diff command. In the case of merge commits, the way you specify the ranges has many forms so I'm not sure based on the results I see, which one is correct or what they all mean. > Somebody else might know better why the diff actually produced the > results you were looking for. I admit it is puzzling to me - I would > have expected to error it out on the output of git rev-parse as there > are three items. Actually I can't think of any other command that can show me what revision ranges translate to in "raw" commits. To me the raw forms are always <sha1> and ^<sha1>, repeated as many times and in as many orders necessary. Don't all of the vanity revision specifications ultimately boil down to "from this parent" and "not from this parent"?
