Re: potential improvement to 'git log' with a range

Jakub Narebski [off-list ref] writes:

Linus Torvalds [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

On Fri, 9 Apr 2010, Aghiles wrote:

quoted

Oh, I should have read the documentation. I was certain that ".."
stands for a range but it is a ... complement.

Well, technically ".." means two different things

 - for "set operations" (ie "git log" and friends) it's the "relative
   complement" of two sets (or "'reachable from A' \ 'reachable from B'").

 - for "edge operations" (ie "git diff" and friends) it's just two
   end-points (aka "range"). A diff doesn't work on sets, it only
   works on the two endpoints.

[...]

quoted

Most SCM's really talk about "ranges". Once you think in those terms,
complex history doesn't work. Git very fundamentally is much about
set theory, and "ranges" is a bad word to use.

For example from I have got from asking on #mercurial IRC channel on
FreeNode (a bit of self promotion: I have done this research to write
an answer to "Git and Mercurial - Compare and Contrast" question on
StackOverflow[1]), Mercurial implements its ".." equivalent in the
term of _numeric range_, even for "hg log" (sic!).

This is fixed with Mercurial 1.6: we now have a query language where
'X..Y' (or 'X::Y') is understood as the set of changesets that are both
descendents of X and ancestors of Y.

[1]
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1598759/git-and-mercurial-compare-and-contrast/1599930#1599930

-- 
Martin Geisler

Mercurial links: http://mercurial.ch/