Re: git log -S or -G

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Tue, Oct 09, 2018 at 08:09:32AM +0900, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Julia Lawall <julia.lawall@lip6.fr> writes:
> 
> >> Doing the same for -S is much harder at the machinery level, as it
> >> performs its thing without internally running "diff" twice, but just
> >> counts the number of occurrences of 'foo'---that is sufficient for
> >> its intended use, and more efficient.
> >
> > There is still the question of whether the number of occurrences of foo
> > decreases or increases.
> 
> Hmph, taking the changes that makes the number of hits decrease
> would catch a subset of "changes that removes 'foo' only---I am not
> interested in the ones that adds 'foo'".  It will avoid getting
> confused by a change that moves an existing 'foo' to another place
> in the same file (as the number of hits does not change), but at the
> same time, it will miss a change that genuinely removes an existing
> 'foo' and happens to add a 'foo' at a different place in the same
> file that is unrelated to the original 'foo'.  Depending on the
> definition of "I am only interested in removed ones", that may or
> may not be acceptable.

I think that is the best we could do for "-S", though, which is
inherently about counting hits.

For "-G", we are literally grepping the diff. It does not seem
unreasonable to add the ability to grep only "-" or "+" lines, and the
interface for that should be pretty straightforward (a tri-state flag to
look in remove, added, or both lines).

-Peff