On Fri, Nov 11, 2016 at 12:19 PM, Dennis Kaarsemaker <den...@kaarsemaker.net> wrote: > Today on #git, a user asked why git diff <(command1) <(command2) gave only > some > gibberish about pipes as output. The answer is fairly simple: git diff gets as > arguments /dev/fd/62 and /dev/fd/63, which are symlinks. So git simply > readlink()s them and gets pipe:[123456] as destination of that link which it > then outputs. > > Given that 'normal' diff provides arguably better output in this case (a diff > of the output of the two commands), I wanted to look at what it would take for > git to handle this. Surprisingly: not much. 1/2 adds support for > --follow-symlinks to git diff --no-index (and only the --no-index variant) and > 2/2 adds support for reading from pipes. >
I think this is really useful. I have an alias so that "diff" is just git diff --no-index. It's really useful, because I find the output of git-diff to be much better. Not being able to diff from pipes or symlinks is something I've run into before and it's annoying. So I could really use this. Thanks, Jake > No tests or documentation updates yet, and I'm not sure whether > --follow-symlinks in other modes than --no-index should be supported, ignored > (as it is now) or cause an error, but I'm leaning towards the third option. > > Dennis Kaarsemaker (2): > diff --no-index: add option to follow symlinks > diff --no-index: support reading from pipes > > diff-no-index.c | 15 ++++++++++++--- > diff.c | 23 +++++++++++++++++++---- > diff.h | 2 +- > 3 files changed, 32 insertions(+), 8 deletions(-) > > -- > 2.10.1-449-gab0f84c >
