Re: What's in git.git (stable)

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Sun, Feb 04, 2007 at 01:36:29AM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

>  - Teaching "git blame" to also use the working tree files
>    and/or index.  I actually think defaulting to working tree
>    when an explicit HEAD is not given (and --cached to use the
>    one in the index) makes a lot of sense, but I haven't got
>    around to code the latter yet.  Not defaulting to HEAD
>    changes semantics, so if we ever are going to do it, I think
>    we should do so before 1.5.0.

Just a thought, but it might be useful to blame the contents of an
arbitrary file (but starting the history at a given pathname). Something
like "git blame --contents /tmp/foo.c file.c", with contents defaulting
to "file.c". There's much discussion of editor interfaces, and this
leaves the possibility of git-blaming the contents of the editor buffer
(after writing it out to a temp file) without having to save changes to
the working tree file.

Admittedly, I think this will be rare, but if you git-blame from an
editor, it seems awkward to either be inaccurate (by blaming the last
saved working tree file, but comparing it to the buffer) or to save the
file as a side effect.

-Peff