Re: Formatting options are ignored when tracking functions

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Philippe Blain <levraiphilippeblain@gmail.com> writes:

> I believe this is working as advertised: only the first line of
> the commit message is shown.
> However as mentioned in the doc, the -L option also triggers patch
> output (-p), which you can omit if you explicitely add --no-patch
> (or shorter, -s).

Heh, I think "working as advertised" is not wrong per-se, but this
feels like a clear design mistake to me, at least at the UI level.
Admittedly, I've never used "log -L" in scripts and I've always used
it interactively, in a context that I want to see the patch output,
so this did not bother me so far.

But what commits -L decides have relevant changes and how these
commits are shown ought to be orthogonal.  It surely may need to run
the content-level diff machinery to see if each commit affects the
area of the code specified via the -L option, but just like "git log
-S<text>" can be used to find commits that change the number of
occurrences of <text>, and allows the users to choose to view them
with "-p" (but not force the --patch mode on), it should behave the
same way, I would think.

With a clear migration plan, we should be able to fix this over
time, I would think.