Thread (14 messages) flat view 14 messages, 6 authors, 2016-06-15

Undocumented git-diff syntax

From: Yann Dirson <hidden>
Date: 2016-06-15 22:49:45

When trying "just to see it it would work", I noticed that the
following syntax appears to do what it looks like it should do.

git diff v1.7.3-rc0:Documentation/RelNotes-1.7.3.txt v1.7.3:Documentation/RelNotes/1.7.3.txt

It is a useful thing, but I could not find described in the manpage.  I have not dig this
part of diff yet, and maybe someone would have already a description of it (does it simply allow
to diff two arbitrary blobs ?).  Is it here just by some magic side-effect ? :)

Another thought: if we can already compare arbitrary blobs, maybe it would not be so hard to
extend it to take arbitrary contents that are not stored as blobs yet ?  (a quick hack would be to
insert an object for them, but that does not look too clean...).  As a use-case, I'm often found generating diffs from within custom scripts, from contents derived from a git repo, but can't use all the bells and whistles (--color, --color-words, etc), just because I have to use plain diff;
that makes the output of those scripts very inconsistent with native git commands.

Would there be any objections to moving into that direction ?

-- 
Yann Dirson - Bertin Technologies
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