[PATCH v3 1/2] range-diff doc: add a section about output stability
From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <hidden>
Date: 2018-11-07 12:22:17
Subsystem:
documentation, the rest · Maintainers:
Jonathan Corbet, Linus Torvalds
The range-diff command is already advertised as porcelain, but let's make it really clear that the output is completely subject to change, particularly when it comes to diff options such as --stat. Right now that option doesn't work, but fixing that is the subject of a later change. Signed-off-by: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <redacted> --- Documentation/git-range-diff.txt | 17 +++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 17 insertions(+)
diff --git a/Documentation/git-range-diff.txt b/Documentation/git-range-diff.txt
index f693930fdb..bbd07a9be8 100644
--- a/Documentation/git-range-diff.txt
+++ b/Documentation/git-range-diff.txt@@ -78,6 +78,23 @@ between patches", i.e. to compare the author, commit message and diff of corresponding old/new commits. There is currently no means to tweak the diff options passed to `git log` when generating those patches. +OUTPUT STABILITY +---------------- + +The output of the `range-diff` command is subject to change. It is +intended to be human-readable porcelain output, not something that can +be used across versions of Git to get a textually stable `range-diff` +(as opposed to something like the `--stable` option to +linkgit:git-patch-id[1]). There's also no equivalent of +linkgit:git-apply[1] for `range-diff`, the output is not intended to +be machine-readable. + +This is particularly true when passing in diff options. Currently some +options like `--stat` can as an emergent effect produce output that's +quite useless in the context of `range-diff`. Future versions of +`range-diff` may learn to interpret such options in a manner specifc +to `range-diff` (e.g. for `--stat` summarizing how the diffstat +changed). CONFIGURATION -------------
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2.19.1.930.g4563a0d9d0