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, 0 deletions

diff --git a/t/t1506-rev-parse-diagnosis.sh b/t/t1506-rev-parse-diagnosis.sh
index c5cb77a0e..f950c1012 100755
--- a/t/t1506-rev-parse-diagnosis.sh
+++ b/t/t1506-rev-parse-diagnosis.sh
@@ -182,4 +182,18 @@ test_expect_success '<commit>:file correctly diagnosed after a pathname' '
 	test_cmp expect actual
 '
 
+test_expect_success 'dotdot is not an empty set' '
+	( H=$(git rev-parse HEAD) && echo $H && echo ^$H ) >expect &&
+
+	git rev-parse HEAD.. >actual &&
+	test_cmp expect actual &&
+
+	git rev-parse ..HEAD >actual &&
+	test_cmp expect actual &&
+
+	echo .. >expect &&
+	git rev-parse .. >actual &&
+	test_cmp expect actual
+'
+
 test_done