Hi Oswald, On Sat, 15 Mar 2025, Oswald Buddenhagen wrote: > in my quest to prepare for hacking git-gui, i ran > > cd .../git/git-gui > git log . > > the result is ... unhelpful. apart from a few commits that were done > directly in the git repo, there are only merges. notably, there is no > trace of the commits that are being merged (and the way gitk presents > this partial log is even more unhelpful). > > i'm speculating that this is the result of git log not handling the > subtree merges in any way, with somewhat predictable consequences. That sounds highly plausible. > i suppose there is overlap with the fact that --follow works only for a > single file, which is also unfortunate. (a recent test case in the repo > would be templates/hooks.) I just ran `git log --follow --raw upstream/seen -- git-gui/` and it does not error out, but as you say, it is unhelpful. It's probably not easy to fix this. I had a quick look at the relevant function (`try_to_follow_renames()` in `tree-diff.c`), and my intuition told me that - `choice = q->queue[0];` would need to be replaced with a loop that adds the `q->queue` elements to a `strset`, - `!strcmp(p->two->path, opt->pathspec.items[0].match)` would need to be scrapped in favor of testing in a loop whether `p->two->path` is matched by any of `opt->pathspec.items` (because there would now be more than 1), - `const char *path[2];` would need to be replaced by a `strvec`, and the entire `pathspec` replacing could only be done after the `for (i = 0; i < q->nr; i++)` loop completed, - The `break;` out of the loop could only be done once all of the input paths were accounted for. However, the devil lies in more details. For example, I expected that `git log --follow -- git-gui/` would error out because `--follow` requires a single file to work. This suggests to me that the logic would have to be modified to expand such implicit pathspec into a full list of files. And I imagine that the performance of this new logic may be quite horrible, what with adding a nested loop for the `pathspec` matching inside `try_to_follow_renames()` existing loop. Of course, the fact that Git silently accepts `--follow -- <dir>/` despite the fact that it cannot handle `<dir>` renames at all is a bummer. Ciao, Johannes
