Hi Philip, > Le 5 juil. 2020 à 16:42, Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.email> a écrit : > > Hi Philippe, > This had been sitting in my inbox.. > -----8<----- >> >> What I wanted to achieve with this patch is to make readers aware that >> they can write e.g. >> >> git log branch1 branch2 branch3 branch4 --not master >> >> to see commits on each of branch1-4, that are not on master, >> since this is not immediately obvious (at least to me) >> in the 'git log' man page. > > The whole revision walk stuff is tricky. Finding the right starting > point for explanations is key, along with picking out where 'normal' > errors are made, as these do help users who aren't simply 'checking the > manual'. (the 20-20 hindsight problem) > > For example, your "that are not on master", and what that means, needs > to be brought out to the new reader rather than being buried > mid-sentence. Most readers will miss those mid-sentence key points and > they can't learn until they have some significant problem that points it > out to them. Sometime we need to point at the 'wrong' things, not just > the right things. (e.g. if branch3 had ben merged a couple of revisions > ago...) Yes, here I meant "on master" in the "not yet merged into master" sense, of course. I'd be more careful if I was writing a commit message or part of the doc itself. > >> Even following the link to gitrevisions[7], >> it is not explicitly mentioned in the "Specifying Ranges" section >> that a range denotes the set of all commits reachable by all given refs, >> minus the ones reachable by all given refs prefixed by '^' or '--not'. >> However, this is really clear in the 'git rev-list' documentation, >> which uses '<commit>...' in the synopsis >> and clearly talks about the "set of commits" point of view: >> >> You can think of this as a set operation. Commits given on the command line form >> a set of commits that are reachable from any of them, and then commits reachable >> from any of the ones given with ^ in front are subtracted from that set. The remaining >> commits are what comes out in the command’s output. Various other options and >> paths parameters can be used to further limit the result. >> > Set operations don't help everyone, just sayin'. > > In some cases: The fact that we exclude any commit reachable from any of > the "^" commits should be mentioned first, and then we select any left > that are reachable from the named tips. This puts a different spin on > the understanding, and helps catch those that have not understood the > other descriptions. It can then be easily linked to the 'two ranges' > case producing otherwise unexpected results. I'll try to tweak the wording for v3. Thanks, Philippe.
