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   gitdiffcore    ( 7 )

настройка вывода различий (Tweaking diff output)

Имя (Name)

gitdiffcore - Tweaking diff output


Синопсис (Synopsis)

git diff *


Описание (Description)

The diff commands git diff-index, git diff-files, and git diff-tree can be told to manipulate differences they find in unconventional ways before showing diff output. The manipulation is collectively called "diffcore transformation". This short note describes what they are and how to use them to produce diff output that is easier to understand than the conventional kind.


THE CHAIN OF OPERATION

The git diff-* family works by first comparing two sets of files:

git diff-index compares contents of a "tree" object and the working directory (when --cached flag is not used) or a "tree" object and the index file (when --cached flag is used);

git diff-files compares contents of the index file and the working directory;

git diff-tree compares contents of two "tree" objects;

In all of these cases, the commands themselves first optionally limit the two sets of files by any pathspecs given on their command-lines, and compare corresponding paths in the two resulting sets of files.

The pathspecs are used to limit the world diff operates in. They remove the filepairs outside the specified sets of pathnames. E.g. If the input set of filepairs included:

:100644 100644 bcd1234... 0123456... M junkfile

but the command invocation was git diff-files myfile, then the junkfile entry would be removed from the list because only "myfile" is under consideration.

The result of comparison is passed from these commands to what is internally called "diffcore", in a format similar to what is output when the -p option is not used. E.g.

in-place edit :100644 100644 bcd1234... 0123456... M file0 create :000000 100644 0000000... 1234567... A file4 delete :100644 000000 1234567... 0000000... D file5 unmerged :000000 000000 0000000... 0000000... U file6

The diffcore mechanism is fed a list of such comparison results (each of which is called "filepair", although at this point each of them talks about a single file), and transforms such a list into another list. There are currently 5 such transformations:

• diffcore-break

• diffcore-rename

• diffcore-merge-broken

• diffcore-pickaxe

• diffcore-order

• diffcore-rotate

These are applied in sequence. The set of filepairs git diff-* commands find are used as the input to diffcore-break, and the output from diffcore-break is used as the input to the next transformation. The final result is then passed to the output routine and generates either diff-raw format (see Output format sections of the manual for git diff-* commands) or diff-patch format.


DIFFCORE-BREAK: FOR SPLITTING UP COMPLETE REWRITES

The second transformation in the chain is diffcore-break, and is controlled by the -B option to the git diff-* commands. This is used to detect a filepair that represents "complete rewrite" and break such filepair into two filepairs that represent delete and create. E.g. If the input contained this filepair:

:100644 100644 bcd1234... 0123456... M file0

and if it detects that the file "file0" is completely rewritten, it changes it to:

:100644 000000 bcd1234... 0000000... D file0 :000000 100644 0000000... 0123456... A file0

For the purpose of breaking a filepair, diffcore-break examines the extent of changes between the contents of the files before and after modification (i.e. the contents that have "bcd1234..." and "0123456..." as their SHA-1 content ID, in the above example). The amount of deletion of original contents and insertion of new material are added together, and if it exceeds the "break score", the filepair is broken into two. The break score defaults to 50% of the size of the smaller of the original and the result (i.e. if the edit shrinks the file, the size of the result is used; if the edit lengthens the file, the size of the original is used), and can be customized by giving a number after "-B" option (e.g. "-B75" to tell it to use 75%).


DIFFCORE-RENAME: FOR DETECTING RENAMES AND COPIES

This transformation is used to detect renames and copies, and is controlled by the -M option (to detect renames) and the -C option (to detect copies as well) to the git diff-* commands. If the input contained these filepairs:

:100644 000000 0123456... 0000000... D fileX :000000 100644 0000000... 0123456... A file0

and the contents of the deleted file fileX is similar enough to the contents of the created file file0, then rename detection merges these filepairs and creates:

:100644 100644 0123456... 0123456... R100 fileX file0

When the "-C" option is used, the original contents of modified files, and deleted files (and also unmodified files, if the "--find-copies-harder" option is used) are considered as candidates of the source files in rename/copy operation. If the input were like these filepairs, that talk about a modified file fileY and a newly created file file0:

:100644 100644 0123456... 1234567... M fileY :000000 100644 0000000... bcd3456... A file0

the original contents of fileY and the resulting contents of file0 are compared, and if they are similar enough, they are changed to:

:100644 100644 0123456... 1234567... M fileY :100644 100644 0123456... bcd3456... C100 fileY file0

In both rename and copy detection, the same "extent of changes" algorithm used in diffcore-break is used to determine if two files are "similar enough", and can be customized to use a similarity score different from the default of 50% by giving a number after the "-M" or "-C" option (e.g. "-M8" to tell it to use 8/10 = 80%).

Note that when rename detection is on but both copy and break detection are off, rename detection adds a preliminary step that first checks if files are moved across directories while keeping their filename the same. If there is a file added to a directory whose contents is sufficiently similar to a file with the same name that got deleted from a different directory, it will mark them as renames and exclude them from the later quadratic step (the one that pairwise compares all unmatched files to find the "best" matches, determined by the highest content similarity). So, for example, if a deleted docs/ext.txt and an added docs/config/ext.txt are similar enough, they will be marked as a rename and prevent an added docs/ext.md that may be even more similar to the deleted docs/ext.txt from being considered as the rename destination in the later step. For this reason, the preliminary "match same filename" step uses a bit higher threshold to mark a file pair as a rename and stop considering other candidates for better matches. At most, one comparison is done per file in this preliminary pass; so if there are several remaining ext.txt files throughout the directory hierarchy after exact rename detection, this preliminary step may be skipped for those files.

Note. When the "-C" option is used with --find-copies-harder option, git diff-* commands feed unmodified filepairs to diffcore mechanism as well as modified ones. This lets the copy detector consider unmodified files as copy source candidates at the expense of making it slower. Without --find-copies-harder, git diff-* commands can detect copies only if the file that was copied happened to have been modified in the same changeset.

DIFFCORE-MERGE-BROKEN: FOR PUTTING COMPLETE REWRITES BACK TOGETHER