Dear Git developers, I have a humble feature request, perhaps to address a usability problem that annoyed me a lot. When Git shows merge commits, it often present a diff called a "combined diff" format. The documentation has an example (https://git-scm.com/docs/diff-format#_combined_diff_format) ``` diff --combined describe.c index fabadb8,cc95eb0..4866510 --- a/describe.c +++ b/describe.c @@@ -98,10 -98,8 +98,10 @@@ return (a_date > b_date) ? -1 : (a_date == b_date) ? 0 : 1; } - static void describe(char *arg) -static void describe(struct commit *cmit, int last_one) ++static void describe(char *arg, int last_one) { + unsigned char sha1[20]; + struct commit *cmit; struct commit_list *list; static int initialized = 0; struct commit_name *n; ``` The from-file/to-file header is my main concern. It shows two lines by default: ``` --- a/describe.c +++ b/describe.c ``` Although the documentation says it allows `--combined-all-paths` option to show all N+1 lines: ``` --- a/file --- a/file --- a/file +++ b/file ``` Why isn't this the default? I am requesting it to show the filenames of all parent by default, for the line-by-line combined diff format. My reason for making it default: 1. When the format is an N-way diff format, we can make it obvious that the comparison is N-way, not two-way, by listing more than two filenames. 2. Even though the duplicated `--- a/file` filename lines might look redundant, it's the _number_ of those lines that matters - how many files are involved in a diff comparison. (In contrast, showing only two filenames is confusing.) As the "combined diff" format is likely to last for a long time, it would be good for Git to set a right default for presenting this format. Thank you.
