[ I put the git list on CC and chose a new topic. ]
On Jan 30, 2008, at 5:03 AM, Shawn O. Pearce wrote:
Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@xxxxxx> wrote:
On Mon, 28 Jan 2008, Shawn O. Pearce wrote:
Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@xxxxxx> wrote:
Another thing (and this concerns you, Shawn): there is this lovely
program called git-gui, and it has most of what we will ever
want to
drive from git-cheetah. Is there any method to call git-gui
such that
it performs a certain command, or is there a chance to get such a
method?
I did not mean to remote control it, just to start it with a default
action, such as "diff file <xyz> to HEAD", or "diff directory
<xyz> to
index".
Oh, like we do for `git gui blame HEAD file` ? :-)
That isn't too difficult. git-gui currently cannot show a diff of
a directory, it can only diff a single file at a time, but yea,
it wouldn't be hard to add a `git gui diff file` to have it open
up and show the current difference of index<->file or HEAD<->index
for that path.
Doing a diff against a random other tree-ish, or between two random
tree-ishes would be possible, but a lot more of a challenge.
The diff viewer in git-gui isn't exactly a reusable widget.
We'd need to refactor that so it could take patch output from any
of the patch generating git commands. Doing such is on my list
of things I'd like to fix in git-gui, but I haven't had time to
do it yet.
Hmm, I'm not sure if such a full diff viewer is the most
important thing to address. Most users (especially Windows
users) already have a favorite graphical diff tool and they expect
a mechanism to plug it into a git workflow.
A difficulty they face is that in a git workflow they often need
to diff between two trees and this case is currently not handled
in a sensible way if you want to view the diffs graphically.
Well you could set GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF to a graphical tool. But
then git would pop-up a new instance of your graphical tool for
every single file and this is certainly not what you expect (I
tried it once and immediately stopped this experiment).
I think a tool that presents the list of files with differences
and can launch an external tool for one of these files would be
very helpful. I started to think about a command line version,
git-difftool, implementing this idea, but do not yet have code.
A GUI version would be preferable for cheetah anyway. Maybe the
patch viewer you sketched above could provide a way to launch an
external tool for any of the files touched by the patch? If the
widget would be reusable maybe it could also be used in gitk?
Steffen
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
