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Ok, I've really held off doing this too damn long, because I'm lazy, and I was always hoping that somebody else would do it. But no, people keep asking for it, but nobody actually did anything, so I decided I might as well bite the bullet, and instead of telling people they could add a "--follow" flag to "git log" to do what they want to do, I decided that it looks like I just have to do it for them.. The code wasn't actually that complicated, in that the diffstat for this patch literally says "70 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)", but I will have to admit that in order to get to this fairly simple patch, you did have to know and understand the internal git diff generation machinery pretty well, and had to really be able to follow how commit generation interacts with generating patches and generating the log. So I suspect that while I was right that it wasn't that hard, I might have been expecting too much of random people - this patch does seem to be firmly in the core "Linus or Junio" territory. To make a long story short: I'm sorry for it taking so long until I just did it. I'm not going to guarantee that this works for everybody, but you really can just look at the patch, and after the appropriate appreciative noises ("Ooh, aah") over how clever I am, you can then just notice that the code itself isn't really that complicated. All the real new code is in the new "try_to_follow_renames()" function. It really isn't rocket science: we notice that the pathname we were looking at went away, so we start a full tree diff and try to see if we can instead make that pathname be a rename or a copy from some other previous pathname. And if we can, we just continue, except we show *that* particular diff, and ever after we use the _previous_ pathname. One thing to look out for: the "rename detection" is considered to be a singular event in the _linear_ "git log" output! That's what people want to do, but I just wanted to point out that this patch is *not* carrying around a "commit,pathname" kind of pair and it's *not* going to be able to notice the file coming from multiple *different* files in earlier history. IOW, if you use "git log --follow", then you get the stupid CVS/SVN kind of "files have single identities" kind of semantics, and git log will just pick the identity based on the normal move/copy heuristics _as_if_ the history could be linearized. Put another way: I think the model is broken, but given the broken model, I think this patch does just about as well as you can do. If you have merges with the same "file" having different filenames over the two branches, git will just end up picking _one_ of the pathnames at the point where the newer one goes away. It never looks at multiple pathnames in parallel. And if you understood all that, you probably didn't need it explained, and if you didn't understand the above blathering, it doesn't really mtter to you. What matters to you is that you can now do git log -p --follow builtin-rev-list.c and it will find the point where the old "rev-list.c" got renamed to "builtin-rev-list.c" and show it as such. Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>maint
Linus Torvalds
18 years ago
committed by
Junio C Hamano
5 changed files with 70 additions and 1 deletions
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