Re* [PATCH] Documentation/git-blame.txt: --follow is a NO-OP

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

On Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 01:31:50PM -0700, Kevin Ballard wrote:

quoted

quoted

I am a little lukewarm on my patch if only because of the precedent it
sets.  There are a trillion options that revision.c parses that are not
necessarily meaningful or implemented for sub-commands that piggy-back
on its option parser. I'm not sure we want to get into manually
detecting and disallowing each one in every caller.

I tend to agree with your final sentiment there. But the point that
users may not realize that blame already follows is also valid. Perhaps
we should catch --follow, as in your patch, but instead of saying that
it's an unknown argument, just print out a helpful message saying blame
already follows renames (and then continue with the blame anyway, so
as to not set a precedent to abort on unknown-but-currently-accepted
flags).

Sure, that would probably make sense. Care to roll a patch with
suggested wording?

Let's do this for now instead.  That would make it clear to people
who (rightly or wrongly) think the "--follow" option should do
something that we already do so, and explain the output that they
see when they do give the "--follow" option to the command.

I may do a "--no-follow" patch as a follow-up, or I may not,
depending on the mood and workload.


 Documentation/git-blame.txt | 6 ++++++
 1 file changed, 6 insertions(+)

diff --git c/Documentation/git-blame.txt w/Documentation/git-blame.txt
index 7ee9236..809823e 100644
--- c/Documentation/git-blame.txt
+++ w/Documentation/git-blame.txt

@@ -20,6 +20,12 @@ last modified the line. Optionally, start annotating from the given revision.
 
 The command can also limit the range of lines annotated.
 
+The origin of lines is automatically followed across whole-file
+renames (currently there is no option to turn the rename-following
+off). To follow lines moved from one file to another, or to follow
+lines that were copied and pasted from another file, etc., see the
+`-C` and `-M` options.
+
 The report does not tell you anything about lines which have been deleted or
 replaced; you need to use a tool such as 'git diff' or the "pickaxe"
 interface briefly mentioned in the following paragraph.