Re: Re: git log -M -- filename is not working?

On May 12, Jeff King wrote:

On Sat, May 08, 2010 at 03:08:53AM -0400, Eli Barzilay wrote:

quoted

So I think that it would really help if (1) the diff options in the
git-log man page move to after its own options, and (2) they appeared
after a title saying that these are the diff options, (3) `--follow'
moves up before the few preceding options that seem to me less
important.  To clarify, I added a simple patch to the end of this
message.  (`git-format-patch' has the same thing, but there it looks
more sensible to leave it as is.)

I have no opinion on moving --follow around, but I definitely agree that
more clearly marking the diff-options (and including them after
revision traversal options) is much better.

Should I send that reorganization as a proper patch then?

quoted

diff --git a/Documentation/git-log.txt b/Documentation/git-log.txt
index fb184ba..6bc7064 100644
--- a/Documentation/git-log.txt
+++ b/Documentation/git-log.txt

@@ -24,7 +24,6 @@ OPTIONS
 -------
 
 :git-log: 1
-include::diff-options.txt[]

This ":git-log: 1" magic should probably follow the include. It sets up
an attribute for diff-options.txt to conditionally include some
log-specific bits.

It seemed like it's a definition that could be used elsewhere too (eg,
in other includes that could be added in the future).

quoted

How about these options:

  git config log.follow if-single-file
    makes it use --follow only when there's a single file path given,
    ignoring it otherwise (with no confusion about it now)

  git config log.follow if-possible
    makes it do the same, but might also do it for more cases if/when
    they become available (so this is the "do the best you can"
    option)

  git config log.follow true
    invalid until it is always possible to use --follow

I'm not thrilled with it. It still leaves the confusing behavior,
but because we forced the user to pick the confusing behavior, we
get to claim it is their fault. So while we may be guilt-free, I'm
not happy with an option that produces such confusing behavior.

Well, yes -- it leaves that potential source of confusion, which could
result if someone recommends to just use the `if-single-file' thing,
and I do that while being unaware of what it actually does.  But OTOH,
it helps with the apparently popular confusion that makes people panic
and send "WHERE DID MY HISTORY GO???" emails.  (It's been about 2-3
weeks since we migrated from svn to git, and I had at least three
people do exactly that.)

I really wonder if it would be that hard to just fix the code to follow
several files. [...]

That would obviously be a better solution...

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!