Re: Diff against a file that doesn't exist in HEAD?

"Justin Erenkrantz" <justin@erenkrantz.com> writes:
> Why is 'diff -rX:Y URL' not equivalent to 'diff URL@X URL@Y'?
>
> I think I now understand what Julian's post about the diff/peg-rev
> mess is about. This is completely counter-intuitive. -- justin

There is something counterintuitive about our peg-rev syntax, but I
don't think it's what you think it is :-).

Our syntax sadly reverses the order (assuming left-to-right writing)
of what it actually means. Thus:

   -rX URL

means "find URL (in HEAD) and grab revision X of that object",
whereas:

   URL@X

means "go to the revision tree for rX, and grab the object at path URL
in that tree".

Notice how in "-rX URL" we use URL first then X, while in "URL@X" we
use X first then URL. Sigh :-).

However, this is unrelated to your comment, that -rX ought to mean the
same as @X. That can never be: there really are two different things
we need to support here. While our two syntaxes may not be ideal in
themselves, they do need to be different, because they represent
different operations. Making them mean the same thing would be an
outright bug.

-Karl

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