Subject: Re: [PATCH 3/3] last-modified: better document how depth in handled

From: Toon Claes <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 02 Dec 2025 12:01:18 +0100

Patrick Steinhardt <[email-masked]> writes:

> Hm, that's confusing indeed. Is it possible for git-last-modified(1) to
> do the "right thing" automatically? That is, given "sub/file", show when
> that specific file has been last modified? Or is there a good
> (non-technical) reason it behaves the way it does?

You bring up a good point. In the version of git-blame-tree(1) that
GitHub did share, the `--recursive` flag is enabled by default. So if
you pass a file path to the command, you'll get the "right thing". But
as I am pointing out in this patch, if you pass a subtree, everything in
that subtree is shown too. You could argue this is the "right thing".

Anyhow, in the version of git-last-modified(1) I submitted upstream,
recursive is not enabled by default. My reason, at the time option
--max-depth wasn't implemented yet. I submitted those changes in a
separate series (these patches also originate from GitHub by the way).
If those patches wouldn't land, I think always-on recursive behavior for
git-last-modified(1) would be quite annoying.

So long story short, as git-last-modified(1) is still marked as
"EXPERIMENTAL", shall we make recursive always-on?

-- 
Cheers,
Toon