Re: [PATCH] combine-diff: use textconv for combined diff format

Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] writes:

But that opens an old can of worms we should have opened and closed four
years ago.

The header shows "diff --cc a" followed by "--- a/a" followed by "+++ b/a"
before the hunk for a two-way merge.  But if we are to "combine and
condense", another possibility is to show:

    diff --cc a/a b/a c/a
    index bf7c788,fa9d23a,5d24d9f..cc69134
    --- a/a
    --- b/a
    +++ c/a
    @@@@ -74,26 -74,6 -74,29 +74,50 @@@@
    ...

to keep the paths information.  I do not think anybody cared so far, and
perhaps we should have done it when we introduced -c/--cc, but it is not
at all worth changing now.

Such feature would greatly simplify gitweb code for dealing with
combined diff (for a merge commit).  It wouldn't have to jump through
hoops[1] to get pre-image names to have correct link to pre-image...

This affects gitweb performance... in those rare case where we have
rename in merge commit (gitweb is smart enough to do this dance only
if there is rename in a merge).

Note that tree-diff doesn't help either - we have only post-image
name.

[1]: fill_from_file_info subroutine, which in turn uses
     git_get_path_by_hash once per parent, which uses git-ls-tree
-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland
ShadeHawk on #git