First, not that anyone should particularly care: I heartily
approve. :-)
On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 9:40 AM Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I pulled the option name from the rev_info field name. It might be too
> broad (we are not ignoring merges during the traversal, only for the
> diff). It could be "--no-diff-merges" or something, but that would
> involve flipping the sense of the boolean (but that would just be in the
> code, not user-visible, so not that big a deal).
Perhaps a bit bikesheddy, but I would suggest some clarifying
notes in the documentation. The fact that `git log` *follows*
merges by default is pretty obvious, but the fact that it doesn't
*diff them at all* by default appears to be surprising to most Git
newcomers. (It was to me, so many years ago, and I see this all
the time on stackoverflow.)
Note that --ignore-merges / --no-ignore-merges affect
only diff generation, not commit traversal. Note
also that by default, "git log -p" does not generate
diffs for merges except when using --first-parent.
See also the -c and --cc options and note that the
default for "git show" is "--cc".
(The "except when using --first-parent" is of course new here.)
This probably needs a bit of tweaking, but the big idea is
to communicate and emphasize three things:
1. "git log -p" and "git show" behave differently by default.
It's a surprise, so we should call it out separately.
2. The default for "git log -p" is no diff at all for merge
commits, so see -c / --cc when you're looking at -m.
3. The default for "git show" is "--cc". (This note doesn't
really belong here; perhaps it should be separately
listed under the -c and --cc options?)
Chris
