Subject: [RFC/PATCH 0/2] git diff <(command1) <(command2)

From: Dennis Kaarsemaker <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Nov 2016 21:19:56 +0100

Today on #git, a user asked why git diff <(command1) <(command2) gave only some
gibberish about pipes as output. The answer is fairly simple: git diff gets as
arguments /dev/fd/62 and /dev/fd/63, which are symlinks. So git simply
readlink()s them and gets pipe:[123456] as destination of that link which it
then outputs.

Given that 'normal' diff provides arguably better output in this case (a diff
of the output of the two commands), I wanted to look at what it would take for
git to handle this. Surprisingly: not much. 1/2 adds support for
--follow-symlinks to git diff --no-index (and only the --no-index variant) and
2/2 adds support for reading from pipes.

No tests or documentation updates yet, and I'm not sure whether
--follow-symlinks in other modes than --no-index should be supported, ignored
(as it is now) or cause an error, but I'm leaning towards the third option.

Dennis Kaarsemaker (2):
  diff --no-index: add option to follow symlinks
  diff --no-index: support reading from pipes

 diff-no-index.c | 15 ++++++++++++---
 diff.c          | 23 +++++++++++++++++++----
 diff.h          |  2 +-
 3 files changed, 32 insertions(+), 8 deletions(-)

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2.10.1-449-gab0f84c