On Thu, Mar 10, 2022 at 12:13 PM Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Sounds like the "apply --no-add" in the opposite direction ;-)
I was thinking more the opposite of "--ours/theirs" when merging, but
yeah, I guess "--no-add" is technically even closer.
> I would find it handy myself, too, though I tend to read my patches
> after applying to my tree so the postimage is usually an invocation
> of "less" away for me.
Obviously just looking at the file itself is always an option, and I
do that too. But I traditionally do that "grep -v" trick as I'm
verifying the patch before sending it out (or before committing)
because it's such a nice way to limit the output just to the changed
parts.
> I do not think it is a bad idea to have an option to give only the
> postimage and another option to give only the preimage. It would
> also trivially allow people to show the side-by-side diff in GUI.
I suspect people doing GUI's are happy just parsing the '-' and '+'
lines themselves, since they want both sides anyway.
For example, 'gitk' already has that diff/old/new checkbox, that does
exactly what my patch does.
And I doubt anybody wants gitk to re-run 'diff' just because somebody
clicked another option - it's only used to visualize the diff that was
already done differently.
Of course, I might be wrong. I didn't actually look at what 'gitk'
does. Maybe it _does_ re-run diff when you click that thing.
But that gitk behavior - which I also do use - is probably the best
way to explain the feature. It's just that I also want to get that
"New version" behavior for plain "git diff" on the command line.
I don't know what a good command line option would be, though. I'd
like it to be somehat short, because the whole point of this is to be
a convenience feature.
So "--new/old"? "--pre/post"?
Or it could be something random, and tie it with the existing "-U"
option, where "-U+" would be "positive side only", and "-U5-" would be
"5 context lines, negative side only". Very dense and convenient,
maybe not all that intuitive?
Linus
