Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> writes: > Getting back to the overall feature, this is definitely something that > has come up before. The last I know of is: > > https://lore.kernel.org/git/20181220002610.43832-1-sandals@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/ > > which everybody seemed to like the direction of; I suspect the original > author (cc'd) just never got around to it again. Compared to this > approach, it uses a command-line option to avoid dereferencing symlinks. > That puts an extra burden on the caller to pass the option, but it's way > less magical; you could drop all of the "does this look like a symlink > to a pipe" heuristics. It would also be much easier to test. ;) Yes, I do remember liking the approach very much and wanted to take it once the "do not dereference symlinks everywhere---just limit it to what was given from the command line" was done. To be quite honest, I think "git diff --no-index A B" should unconditionally dereference A and/or B if they are symlinks, whether they are symlinks to pipes, regular files or directories, and otherwise treat symlinks in A and B the same way as "git diff" if A and B are directories. But that is a design guideline that becomes needed only after we start resurrecting Brian's effort, not with these patches that started this thread. Thanks.
