The behavior of "git diff --stat" is rather odd for files that have zero lines of changes: it will discount them entirely unless they were renames. Which means that the stat output will simply not show files that only had "other" changes: they were created or deleted, or their mode was changed. Now, those changes do show up in the summary, but so do renames, so the diffstat logic is inconsistent. Why does it show renames with zero lines changed, but not mode changes or added files with zero lines changed? So change the logic to not check for "is_renamed", but for "is_interesting" instead, where "interesting" is judged to be any action but a pure data change (because a pure data change with zero data changed really isn't worth showing, if we ever get one in our diffpairs). So if you did chmod +x Makefile git diff --stat before, it would show empty (" 0 files changed"), with this it shows Makefile | 0 1 file changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-) which I think is a more correct diffstat (and then with "--summary" it shows *what* the metadata change to Makefile was - this is completely consistent with our handling of renamed files). Side note: the old behavior was *really* odd. With no changes at all, "git diff --stat" output was empty. With just a chmod, it said "0 files changed". No way is our legacy behavior sane. Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds --- This was triggered by kernel developers not noticing that they had added zero-sized files, because those additions never showed up in the diffstat. NOTE! This does break two of our tests, so we clearly did this on purpose, or at least tested for it. I just uncommented the subtests that this makes irrelevant, and changed the output of another one. Another test was simply buggy. It used "git diff --root cmit", and thought that would be the diff against root. It isn't, and never has been. It just happened to give the same (no file) output before. Fixing --stat to show new files showed how buggy the test was. The "--root" thing matters for "git show" or "git log" (when showing a root commit) and for "git diff-tree" with a single tree. Maybe we would *want* to make "git diff --root " be the "diff between root and cmit", but that's not what it actually is. Comments?