显示来自选定git提交的组合差异

Question

I have a repository with a lot of changes. I want to review changes related to particular issue. Those commits are already in the master branch and are interleaved with unrelated commits. I can identify those interesting commits via specific text in their message. I can also see the individual changes with git diff command. However, I would like to see them as single patch: If first commit changed some lines and the second one changed them again, I do not want to see the interim state. I also do not want to see any changes from unrelated commits (unless necessary to resolve conflicts).

The only way to achieve this I can think of, is to update the whole tree to the state before first commit. Apply the changes one after another and then git diff working directory against base revision.

However, this won't work, if included commits depend on not-included commits. Instead of failing or having to manually resolve conflicts, I would prefer to just include necessary changes from other commits. The output will be read only by humans, so as long as all the relevant changes are included, I don't care how the conflicts are handled.

It would also be nice, if I didn't have to stash my local changes before this operation.

How to avoid those problems and generate such patch?

Answer 1

There's a program called combinediff which should be able to do this; make a diff for each change you care about, then feed them all to combinediff . It's part of the patchutils package, which on Linux is typically available via your distribution's package manager. The source is located at https://github.com/twaugh/patchutils .