[ I apologize for not being more reactive the last few years. I still
love Git and this ml, but I'm struggling to find time to contribute. ]
On 5/11/23 19:37, Junio C Hamano wrote:
The behaviour came in the v1.8.4 days with a series that was merged
by e2ecd252 (Merge branch 'mm/diff-no-patch-synonym-to-s',
2013-07-22), which
* made "--no-patch" a synonym for "-s";
* fixed "-s --patch", in which the effect of "-s" got stuck and did
not allow the patch output to be re-enabled again with "--patch";
* updated documentation to explain "--no-patch" as a synonym for
"-s".
While it is very clear that the intent of the author was to make it
a synonym for "-s" and not a "feature-wise enable/disable" option,
that is what we've run with for the past 10 years.
That's too old for me to remember exactly my state of mind, but if you
want to do a bit of archeology, the origin is there:
https://public-inbox.org/git/51E3DC47.70107@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx/
Essentially, Stefan Beller was using 'git show --format="%ad"' and
expecting it to show only the author date, and for merge commits it also
showed the patch (--cc). I suggested -s and noticed that the option
wasn't easily discoverable, hence the patch series to better document it
and add --no-patch as a synonym.
Probably I did not get all the subtleties of the different kinds of
outputs. I guess I considered the output of diff to be the one specified
by --format plus the patch (not considering --raw, --stat & friends),
hence "get only the output specified by --format" and "disable the
patch" were synonym to me. Looking more closely, it's rather clear to me
they are not, and that
git show --raw --patch --no-patch
should be equivalent to
git show --raw
Cheers,
--
Matthieu Moy
https://matthieu-moy.fr/
