Re: [BUG?] --boundary inconsistent with path limiting
From: Junio C Hamano <hidden>
Date: 2016-08-04 20:11:23
Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:
But now if I limit to "a.t", I get no output at all: $ git log --format='%m %s' --boundary a..c -- a.t whereas I would have expected "- a" to show the boundary. Is this a bug, or are my expectations wrong?
In a range a..c, there is nothing that touches the path, so there is no positive outcome. As boundaries are essentially the parents of the "last" positive outcome, I would not be surprised if I see an empty output in that scenario. But to be honest, I do not think anybody cared between the distinction between a bug and intended behaviour in this case. The boundary started as a debugging aid for the traversal machinery and not as a serious feature to support end-user workflow. In its early days, I do not think we even showed _all_ boundaries (instead we showed only ones that we have already parsed, or something like that). I think we added code to do a bit more work when asked to show boundaries to show boundary commits that the traditional "primarily for debugging" logic wouldn't have shown later, losing its value as a debugging aid (because it no longer showed precisely where the traversal machinery stopped digging).