Re: git rev-list -S ?

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 01:53:14PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

quoted

|    $ git log -S'it drives an external
|   an external' master Documentation/RelNotes

is a way to find commits that introduced and then removed the block of
text to files in the named directory, starting at the tip of 'master'.

Most of the "ultimate tracking tool" dream has already been realized in
"git blame" except one major part.  Once you find where the blame lies,
the tool _could_ help the user to find where these blamed lines came from
more than it currently does.

Related to this is the line-level history browser project. The idea was
basically to get a log-like view (i.e., reverse chronological commits)
of a chunk of code, tracing the ancestry of a particular chunk of lines.

This was done by Bo Yang as a GSoC project in 2010, but the code still
hasn't been merged. As I recall, it mostly works, but there are perhaps
some corner cases or ugly parts of the code still to be re-worked.
Thomas Rast was cleaning it up some, and could say more on the current

This is all correct.  It mostly works, which is the main impediment to
further work :-)  You can try it by merging

  git://github.com/trast/git.git line-log-cleanup

It segfaults if you attempt to track more than one range, however.

I have started some rewriting, which tries to phrase it more in terms of
simple operations on sets of lines, and pushed that as

  git://github.com/trast/git.git line-log-WIP

This was successful in that the newly written code is easier to read and
completely broken.

-- 
Thomas Rast
trast@{inf,student}.ethz.ch