teach diffcore-rename to optionally ignore empty content

Our rename detection is a heuristic, matching pairs of
removed and added files with similar or identical content.
It's unlikely to be wrong when there is actual content to
compare, and we already take care not to do inexact rename
detection when there is not enough content to produce good
results.

However, we always do exact rename detection, even when the
blob is tiny or empty. It's easy to get false positives with
an empty blob, simply because it is an obvious content to
use as a boilerplate (e.g., when telling git that an empty
directory is worth tracking via an empty .gitignore).

This patch lets callers specify whether or not they are
interested in using empty files as rename sources and
destinations. The default is "yes", keeping the original
behavior. It works by detecting the empty-blob sha1 for
rename sources and destinations.

One more flexible alternative would be to allow the caller
to specify a minimum size for a blob to be "interesting" for
rename detection. But that would catch small boilerplate
files, not large ones (e.g., if you had the GPL COPYING file
in many directories).

A better alternative would be to allow a "-rename"
gitattribute to allow boilerplate files to be marked as
such. I'll leave the complexity of that solution until such
time as somebody actually wants it. The complaints we've
seen so far revolve around empty files, so let's start with
the simple thing.

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 5 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/diff.c b/diff.c
index 377ec1e..0b70aad 100644
--- a/diff.c
+++ b/diff.c
@@ -3136,6 +3136,7 @@ void diff_setup(struct diff_options *options)
 	options->rename_limit = -1;
 	options->dirstat_permille = diff_dirstat_permille_default;
 	options->context = 3;
+	DIFF_OPT_SET(options, RENAME_EMPTY);
 
 	options->change = diff_change;
 	options->add_remove = diff_addremove;
@@ -3506,6 +3507,10 @@ int diff_opt_parse(struct diff_options *options, const char **av, int ac)
 	}
 	else if (!strcmp(arg, "--no-renames"))
 		options->detect_rename = 0;
+	else if (!strcmp(arg, "--rename-empty"))
+		DIFF_OPT_SET(options, RENAME_EMPTY);
+	else if (!strcmp(arg, "--no-rename-empty"))
+		DIFF_OPT_CLR(options, RENAME_EMPTY);
 	else if (!strcmp(arg, "--relative"))
 		DIFF_OPT_SET(options, RELATIVE_NAME);
 	else if (!prefixcmp(arg, "--relative=")) {