Re: Can't diff against the 00000000 revision

On Tue, Jan 12, 2016 at 11:26:24AM -0500, Stefan Monnier wrote:

quoted

And hopefully that explains why "000000" does not necessarily make a
good placeholder for "the empty thing". There are multiple empty things,
and it is not clear what:

quoted

  git diff 0000000 1234abcd

quoted

means. Is 0000000 a tree? A blob?

Well, Git is the one who uses 000000 to refer to an empty thing, but
indeed it seems like it does inconsistently: it's sometimes used as the
"empty blob" and sometimes as an "empty tree".

Yes. You can think of it kind of like a NULL pointer; it just means
"nothing". So its meaning is context-dependent. The problem is if we
expect to feed it back to git in a place where the context isn't
obvious.

-Peff