Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:
The internals of the path diffing code, including ll_diff_tree_paths(),
all take an extra combine_diff_path parameter which they use as the tail
of a list of results, appending any new entries to it.
The public-facing diff_tree_paths() takes the same argument, but it just
makes the callers more awkward. They always start with a clean list, and
have to set up a fake head struct to pass in.
Let's keep the public API clean by always returning a new list. That
keeps the fake struct as an implementation detail of tree-diff.c.
Yes, this is much nicer. I've always hated these code paths related
to "multitree" optimization, but these clean-ups make them more
palatable.
Thanks.