Re: General question about "git range-diff"

["brian m. carlson" <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>]

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On 2023-11-02 at 18:56:39, Robin Dos Anjos wrote:
> Hi git community!

Hi,

> I'm a bit intimidated as this is my first message in the mailing list but I'll give it a go!

No reason to be intimidated.  We're very friendly here.

> This is so useful to me that I'm wondering why "git range-diff" does
> not implement this behavior. We could imagine a flag that would make
> it behave as I described. Is this something that was ever considered?
> Are there any technical difficulties that I'm completely missing? Do
> you think this could be helpful to other people?

I'm not the author of range-diff, but I believe it was based on an
earlier tool named git-tbdiff[0], which had similar behaviour and
similar limitations.  My guess as to why nobody implemented a feature to
handle the squashed commits case is that typically the recommended
workflow in Git is to write small independent, logical, well-described,
bisectable commits, and squashing is not recommended because it destroys
all the work that people have put into making nice commits.

Of course, in many situations, people don't write nice commits like
that, and many commits are effectively fixup commits with very short
messages (e.g. "make it work"), sometimes containing profanity directed
at the computer, and in those environments, squashing may be a
legitimate choice.  However, it isn't typically a workflow that gets a
lot of focus because most tooling is focused on the more recommended
approach.

Having said that, I'm sure people would find a feature like you
suggested useful, although I'm not likely to use it myself.  It's
possible that somebody might see your message and implement it, but
usually patches come in from people who feel strongly about a feature
and implement it themselves.  If you feel like you'd like to try such a
change, I'm sure you can find folks to review it and provide feedback.

[0] https://github.com/trast/tbdiff
-- 
brian m. carlson (he/him or they/them)
Toronto, Ontario, CA

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