Re: [PATCH] fmt-patch: understand old <his> notation

Linus Torvalds [off-list ref] writes:

Maybe not. I've actually cursed the fact that I made "git diff X" mean 
"diff from X to current working tree", because it almost never makes any 
sense at all when X is anything but "HEAD".

Actually, I do "git diff next" all the time while on the tip of
my topic branches, and also when merging a topic branch into
"master".  This "a different tree with the current working
files" is probably the second most frequently used form for me
(the first one is of course HEAD vs working files).