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Date:   Thu, 21 Mar 2019 15:12:53 +0100 (STD)
From:   Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>
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To:     Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
cc:     Duy Nguyen <pclouds@gmail.com>, Denton Liu <liu.denton@gmail.com>,
        Git Mailing List <git@vger.kernel.org>,
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        <avarab@gmail.com>, Andreas Schwab <schwab@linux-m68k.org>,
        Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com>, Johannes Sixt <j6t@kdbg.org>,
        Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.org>,
        Vincent Guittot <vincent.guittot@linaro.org>,
        Viresh Kumar <viresh.kumar@linaro.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] git-diff.txt: prefer not using <commit>..<commit>
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Hi Junio,

On Mon, 18 Mar 2019, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Duy Nguyen <pclouds@gmail.com> writes:
>
> >> -       This is synonymous to the previous form.  If <commit> on
> >> +       This is synonymous to the previous form.  However,
> >> +       users should prefer the previous form over this form
> >> +       as this form may be more confusing due to the same
> >> +       notation having a logically conflicting meaning in
> >> +       linkgit:git-rev-list[1]-ish commands.  If <commit> on
> >>         one side is omitted, it will have the same effect as
> >>         using HEAD instead.
> >
> > This is fine as-is. But another option to reduce even more exposure of
> > these forms (both <commit>..[<commit>] and <commit>...[<commit>]) is
> > to delete these forms in "DESCRIPTION" section and add maybe "EXOTIC
> > SYNTAX" (or something) section after "OPTIONS" for just them.
>
> There is no other way to express A...B (well, short of spelling it
> out as "$(git merge-base A B) B"), so while it makes quite a lot of
> sense to discourage A..B (simply because .. is unnecessary and can
> be replace with a string with one fewer letter in it, namely " "),
> I am not sure if it is wise to throw the three-dot form into the
> same basket.

I just happened to come upon a use case where the `A..B` way is not
actually useless: just after fetching a branch, I got the usual update
lines, and it is pretty convenient to be able to use them not only for
`git log`, but also for `git diff` invocations, to see what actually
changed (from two angles).

So maybe you could register this as a vote to not totally strike the A..B
notation from the manual.

Ciao,
Dscho