Sergey Organov <sorganov@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > >> I was only trying to help you polish the text you added to explain >> what you called the "legacy feature" to reflect the reason behind >> that legacy. As you obviously were not there back then when I made >> "--cc" imply "-m" while keeping "-p" not to imply "-m". > > Your help is appreciated, yet unfortunately I still can't figure how to > improve the text based on your advice. If I were doing this patch, I would start from something like this: -m:: By default, comparisons between parent commits and the child commit are not shown for merge commits, but with the `-m` option, `git log` can be told to show comparisons for merges in chosen formats (e.g. `--raw`, `-p`, `--stat`). When output formats (e.g. `--cc`) that are specifically designed to show better comparisons for merges are given, this option is implied; in other words, you do not have to say e.g. `git log -m --cc`. `git log --cc` suffices. The rest is a tangent that is not related to the above. I suspect that this also applies to newer `--remerge-diff`, as it also targets to show merges better than the original "pairwise patches" that were largely useless, but the right way to view what `--cc` and other formats do for non-merge commits is *not* to think that they "imply" `-p`. It is more like that the output from these formats on non-merge commits happen to be identical to what `-p` would produce. You could say that the "magic" these options know to show merge commits better degenerates to what `-p` gives when applied to non-merge commits. Another way to look at it is that `--cc` and friends, even though they are meant as improvements for showing merges over "-m -p" that gives human-unreadable pair-wise diffs, do not imply "--merges" (i.e. show only merge commits)---hence they have to show something for non-merge commits. Because output formats for all of them were modeled loosely [*] after "-p" output, we happened to pick it as the format they fall back to when they are not showing comparisons for merge commits. [Footnote] * Here, `-p` roughly means "what GNU patch and `git apply` take". Output from `-c` and `--cc` on merge commits do not qualify, but they are loosely modeled after it.
