Re: What should I do to display the diff of even a simple merge commit?

Petr Baudis [off-list ref] writes:

  I'm not sure if there is any clever switch for this, but I usually
just use one of

	git diff mergecommit^1 mergecommit
	git diff mergecommit^2 mergecommit

depending on which parent I want the diff against. If you always do your
merges as "on mainline, merging in a topic" without fast-forwarding,
diff against the first parent will be probably the right one and you can
simply use:

	git diff mergecommit^ mergecommit

Frankly, we should make "git log --first-parent -p" DTRT, I think.

The attitude towards merges we maintain officially is "all parents are
equal", but in practice, there often are cases where --first-parent
traversal makes a lot more sense when browsing the history (especially
"the official" one).  The use of that option should be a clear enough sign
that diff between the first parent and the merge result is asked for.