[dogleash]

Dude, I'm not making a defense of mailing list workflows here. I'm just pondering the nature of the world where despite all the yapping about git I've seen floating around on the internet for as long as I've been lurking social media, the yappers are just recently keying in on something.

[aseipp]

If you're asking "Why did this take 15 years for people to understand" and my reply is "Because it was under 1000 layers of other bullshit", then that's the answer to your pontification. It has nothing to do with whether you think email is good or not. You pondered, I answered. That simple.

[another-acct]

> Because it was under 1000 layers of other bullshit

Not only because of that.

git-range-diff, while absolutely a killer feature, is a relatively new feature of git as well (a bit similarly to "git rebase --update-refs" -- which I've just learned of from you <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41511241>, so thanks for that :)).

Namely, git-range-diff existed out-of-tree as "git tbdiff" <https://github.com/trast/tbdiff> originally. It was ported to git proper in August 2018 <https://github.com/git/git/commit/d9c66f0b5bfd>; so it's not a feature people could have used "15 years ago".

(FWIW, before git-range-diff was a thing, and also before I had learned about git-tbdiff, I had developed a silly little script for myself, for doing nearly the same. Several other people did the same for themselves, too. Incremental review was vital for most serious maintainers, so it was a no-brainer to run "git format-patch" on two versions of a series, and colordiff those. The same workflow is essential for comparing a backport to the original (upstream) version of the series. Of course my stupid little script couldn't recognize reorderings of patches, or a subject line rewrite while the patch body stayed mostly the same.)