Re: [PATCH] diffcore-pickaxe doc: document -S and -G properly

Ramkumar Ramachandra [off-list ref] writes:

What I was trying to say is that it's an accidental feature

There is nothing accidental about it.  It was a very conscious
design decision.

When a commit moves a file wholesale without affecting the block of
code you are interested in, you know that whole block came from the
file in the old tree at pre-rename location without looking at
anywhere else.  That is why renamed but pickaxe-uninteresting
filepairs are dropped.

When a commit moves (some lines of) the block of code you are
interested in from one file to another, it may have been a single
instance moving to another place, but it may well have been multiple
copies consolidated into one (the new copy, pickaxe digging from
future to past may see "disappearing").  That is a significant event
worth digging into further by first stopping there and then
inspecting the whole change with --pickaxe-all to see what changes
that are similar to the change in question exist in the other parts
(notice the multiple) of the tree.

If you do not understand it, then you really should re-read
$gmane/217 and then its explanation I wrote 4 years ago (both of
which I already gave you URLs to in this thread).

Junio C Hamano wrote:

When a commit moves a file wholesale without affecting the block of
code you are interested in, you know that whole block came from the
file in the old tree at pre-rename location without looking at
anywhere else.  That is why renamed but pickaxe-uninteresting
filepairs are dropped.

When a commit moves (some lines of) the block of code you are
interested in from one file to another, it may have been a single
instance moving to another place, but it may well have been multiple
copies consolidated into one (the new copy, pickaxe digging from
future to past may see "disappearing").  That is a significant event
worth digging into further by first stopping there and then
inspecting the whole change with --pickaxe-all to see what changes
that are similar to the change in question exist in the other parts
(notice the multiple) of the tree.

Makes sense.  I wasn't looking at it from a macro perspective.

Yeah, I constantly re-read 217 and your follow-up.