On Sun, May 06, 2018 at 10:04:31PM -0400, Johannes Schindelin wrote: > > Let's, please, not fall into the trap of polluting git-branch with > > utterly unrelated functionality, as has happened a few times with > > other Git commands. Let's especially not do so merely for the sake of > > tab-completion. git-branch is for branch management; it's not for > > diff'ing. > > I totally disagree. `git branch` is *the* command to work with branches. > Yes, you can manage branches. But you can also list them. And now you can > also compare them.
One of the things I don't like about "git branch --diff" is that this feature is not _just_ about branches at all. E.g., I could do: git tbdiff HEAD~10 HEAD~5 foo Or even: git tbdiff v2.16.0 v2.17.0 my-rewritten-v2.17.0 Those arguments really are just commitishes, not necessarily branches. One of the current interface rules for "git branch" is that the branch names we hand it are interpreted _exactly_ as branch names. You cannot "git branch -m v2.16.0", and there is no ambiguity in "git branch -d foo" if "foo" is both a tag and a branch. But this new mode does not fit the pattern at all. If we were to attach this to an existing command, I think it has more to do with "diff" than "branch". But I'm not sure we want to overload "diff" either (which has traditionally been about two endpoints, and does not really traverse at all, though arguably "foo...bar" is a bit of a cheat :) ). > > Of the suggestions thus far, Junio's git-topic-diff seems the least > > worse, and doesn't suffer from tab-completion problems. > > Except that this is too limited a view. Right, I agree with you. Topic branches are the intended use, but that's not what it _does_, and obviously it can be applied in other cases. So since "branch" is too specific, I think "topic branch" is even more so. It's really "diff-history" or something, I think. That's not very catchy, but I think the best name would imply that it was diffing a set of commits (so even "diff-commit" would not be right, because that again sounds like endpoints). -Peff
