Theodore Tso <tytso@xxxxxxx> writes: > The bigger inconsistency is with git-format-patch, which *does* take a > set of commits, and where "git-format-patch a" does operates on a very > different set of commits than what what "git-rev-list a" returns. I > understand that for backwards compatibility "git-format-patch a" is > equivalent to "git-format-patch a..HEAD", but what it means is that > all other ways of specifying sets of commits work with > git-format-patch, *except* if you want to specify all commits from the > beginning of time to a particular head (i.e., "git-rev-list a") is > something that you simply can not possibly do using git-format-patch. Heh, I really hate when people say this. If you wanted to, you could: $ git format-patch a a The original syntax $ git format-patch upstream may have been a mistake and maybe $ git format-patch ^upstream or even $ git format-patch --since upstream might have been better. It is (1) too late to change now, and (2) for too small or perhaps negative a gain. The reason why I say (2) is because _I_ think it is far more common and frequent to want to get "patches the other guy does not have" than "everything since nothingness up to this point". Oops. I think I have a solution. $ git format-patch a a does not do _ROOT_ commit. So you have to say $ git format-patch --root a a for the above example to work. Why not tweak the option parser so that: $ git format-patch --root a to do what you want? Without --root and with a single positive commit, it can keep doing the traditional "what I did since I forked from that guy's history". Hmm... - 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
