specifying ranges: we did not mean to make ".." an empty set

Either end of revision range operator can be omitted to default to HEAD,
as in "origin.." (what did I do since I forked) or "..origin" (what did
they do since I forked).  But the current parser interprets ".."  as an
empty range "HEAD..HEAD", and worse yet, because ".." does exist on the
filesystem, we get this annoying output:

  $ cd Documentation/howto
  $ git log .. ;# give me recent commits that touch Documentation/ area.
  fatal: ambiguous argument '..': both revision and filename
  Use '--' to separate filenames from revisions

Surely we could say "git log ../" or even "git log -- .." to disambiguate,
but we shouldn't have to.

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

1 files changed, 14 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/builtin/rev-parse.c b/builtin/rev-parse.c
index 13495b88f..47b4e7adb 100644
--- a/builtin/rev-parse.c
+++ b/builtin/rev-parse.c
@@ -224,6 +224,7 @@ static int try_difference(const char *arg)
 	const char *next;
 	const char *this;
 	int symmetric;
+	static const char head_by_default[] = "HEAD";
 
 	if (!(dotdot = strstr(arg, "..")))
 		return 0;
@@ -235,9 +236,20 @@ static int try_difference(const char *arg)
 	next += symmetric;
 
 	if (!*next)
-		next = "HEAD";
+		next = head_by_default;
 	if (dotdot == arg)
-		this = "HEAD";
+		this = head_by_default;
+
+	if (this == head_by_default && next == head_by_default &&
+	    !symmetric) {
+		/*
+		 * Just ".."?  That is not a range but the
+		 * pathspec for the parent directory.
+		 */
+		*dotdot = '.';
+		return 0;
+	}
+
 	if (!get_sha1(this, sha1) && !get_sha1(next, end)) {
 		show_rev(NORMAL, end, next);
 		show_rev(symmetric ? NORMAL : REVERSED, sha1, this);