On Mon, 25 Apr 2005, Linus Torvalds wrote:

This also makes me think that we should just make "show-diff" show the
same format, at which point show-diff actually matches all the other
tools, and it is likely to make show-diff more useful to boot.

The thing I personally use "show-diff" for these days is actually just to
check whether I have anything dirty in my tree, and then it would actually
be preferable to just get the filenaname printout (in the same old
"diff-cache" format) rather than the full diff.

That makes a lot of sense.  And I think that path filtering in diff-tree 
should be factored out and supported into all of the diff-* commands as 
well (not necessarily in diff-tree-helper).


Nicolas