Linus Torvalds wrote:
We've discussed adding a "--follow" flag to tell "git log" to consider the
argument to not be a "pathname filter", but a "individual file" kind of
thing, and I think there was even a patch for it, but I suspect it hasn't
been a big issue, probably partly because you get rather used to the
"pathname filter" approach fairly quickly.
If I remember correctly, the patch implementing --follow was fairly
intrusive, and was unfortunate in that it was posted during changes
in diffcore.
Lack of --follow is not a big issue because you can do this "by hand";
you can use git-diff-tree -M at the end of file history to check if
[git considers] it was moved from somewhere.
During discussion we have agreed that we would like to have both
--follow rename following limiter and static path limiter (and
that it would be nice to extend static path limiter to include globs).
--
Jakub Narebski
Poland