Jeff King <p...@peff.net> writes:
> On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 10:50:21AM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>
>> What the function does appears somewhat iffy in the modern world.
>> We are relying on the fact that while Git is operating in this mode
>> of reading a tuple of commits per line and doing log-tree, that Git
>> itself will not do the history traversal (instead, another instance
>> of Git that feeds us via our standard input is walking the history)
>> for this piece of code to work correctly.
>>
>> Of course, the "diff-tree --stdin" command was meant to sit on the
>> downstream of "rev-list --parents", so the assumption the code makes
>> (i.e. the parents field of the in-core commit objects do not have to
>> be usable for history traversal) may be reasonable, but still...
>
> I'm not sure it's that weird. "diff-tree" is about diffing, not
> traversal. The only reason it touches commit->parents at all (and
> doesn't just kick off a diff between the arguments it gets) is that it's
> been stuck with pretty-printing the commits, which might ask to show the
> parents.
Yeah, I understand all that as 45392a648d ("git-diff-tree --stdin:
show all parents.", 2006-02-05) was mostly mine. It's just I sense
that the recent trend is to take whatever existing code and see if
they are reusable in other contexts, and this is one of the things
that people might want to libify, but cannot be as-is.
