git log FILE vs git log --follow FILE missing commits

[Chris Packham <judge.packham@gmail.com>]

Hi,

I've just hit a problem where git log doesn't want to tell me about a
commit that touches a specific file.

I wanted to point someone at a particular change that I knew was made
to a file so I fired up 'git log FILE' and to my surprise it wasn't
listed. I wondered if I had remembered wrong so went grepping to
confirm the change was in the file I thought it was, sure enough it
was there.

Poking around a bit I found that git log --follow FILE shows the
intended commit but git log FILE doesn't (it does show other commits
that touch the file, most of which have tags if that's significant).
The file hasn't been renamed so I didn't really expect --follow to
change any behavior.

The version of git I'm using is 2.25.0 from
http://ppa.launchpad.net/git-core/ppa/ubuntu bionic main. I also tried
2.24.1 and 2.23.1 with the same problem.

Any suggestions for tracking this down?

Thanks,
Chris