Documentation / git-patch-id.txton commit Eleventh batch for 2.10 (0aaf250)
   1git-patch-id(1)
   2===============
   3
   4NAME
   5----
   6git-patch-id - Compute unique ID for a patch
   7
   8SYNOPSIS
   9--------
  10[verse]
  11'git patch-id' [--stable | --unstable]
  12
  13DESCRIPTION
  14-----------
  15Read a patch from the standard input and compute the patch ID for it.
  16
  17A "patch ID" is nothing but a sum of SHA-1 of the file diffs associated with a
  18patch, with whitespace and line numbers ignored.  As such, it's "reasonably
  19stable", but at the same time also reasonably unique, i.e., two patches that
  20have the same "patch ID" are almost guaranteed to be the same thing.
  21
  22IOW, you can use this thing to look for likely duplicate commits.
  23
  24When dealing with 'git diff-tree' output, it takes advantage of
  25the fact that the patch is prefixed with the object name of the
  26commit, and outputs two 40-byte hexadecimal strings.  The first
  27string is the patch ID, and the second string is the commit ID.
  28This can be used to make a mapping from patch ID to commit ID.
  29
  30OPTIONS
  31-------
  32
  33--stable::
  34        Use a "stable" sum of hashes as the patch ID. With this option:
  35         - Reordering file diffs that make up a patch does not affect the ID.
  36           In particular, two patches produced by comparing the same two trees
  37           with two different settings for "-O<orderfile>" result in the same
  38           patch ID signature, thereby allowing the computed result to be used
  39           as a key to index some meta-information about the change between
  40           the two trees;
  41
  42         - Result is different from the value produced by git 1.9 and older
  43           or produced when an "unstable" hash (see --unstable below) is
  44           configured - even when used on a diff output taken without any use
  45           of "-O<orderfile>", thereby making existing databases storing such
  46           "unstable" or historical patch-ids unusable.
  47
  48        This is the default if patchid.stable is set to true.
  49
  50--unstable::
  51        Use an "unstable" hash as the patch ID. With this option,
  52        the result produced is compatible with the patch-id value produced
  53        by git 1.9 and older.  Users with pre-existing databases storing
  54        patch-ids produced by git 1.9 and older (who do not deal with reordered
  55        patches) may want to use this option.
  56
  57        This is the default.
  58
  59<patch>::
  60        The diff to create the ID of.
  61
  62GIT
  63---
  64Part of the linkgit:git[1] suite