Subject: Re: [PATCH v4] log,diff-tree: add --combined-all-names option

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 07 Feb 2019 15:31:28 -0800

Elijah Newren <[email-masked]> writes:

> Now, the question: In addition to the two "from" headers, how many
> "to" headers do we emit?  In particular, do we emit both a "copied to
> F" and a "renamed to F" header, or just a combined "renamed/copied to
> F" header?

There is only a single path that can be on the "to", as there is
only one final result, but _how_ the contents got to that path would
be different, so to be technically truly correct, you would end up
showing N "to" lines for a N-way merge, each of which gives the same
path in the postimage, but some may say renamed, another may say
copioed and some others may need to say in-place edited.

That would increase the number of necessary lines from N (from) + 1
(to) to N*2 (N for each of from and to), which makes it even less
economical.

And showing a single "renamed/copied" feels more like a cop-out to
avoid being techincally incorrect, than giving a useful piece of
information to the users.

I am inclined to say that we should do _without_ any "to" line.  And
if we can do without any "to", perhaps we do not need "from", either.