DESCRIPTION
-----------
-Lists commit objects in reverse chronological order starting at the
-given commit(s), taking ancestry relationship into account. This is
-useful to produce human-readable log output.
+List commits that are reachable by following the `parent` links from the
+given commit(s), but exclude commits that are reachable from the one(s)
+given with a '{caret}' in front of them. The output is given in reverse
+chronological order by default.
-Commits which are stated with a preceding '{caret}' cause listing to
-stop at that point. Their parents are implied. Thus the following
-command:
+You can think of this as a set operation. Commits given on the command
+line form a set of commits that are reachable from any of them, and then
+commits reachable from any of the ones given with '{caret}' in front are
+subtracted from that set. The remaining commits are what comes out in the
+command's output. Various other options and paths parameters can be used
+to further limit the result.
+
+Thus, the following command:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
$ git rev-list foo bar ^baz
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
-means "list all the commits which are included in 'foo' and 'bar', but
-not in 'baz'".
+means "list all the commits which are reachable from 'foo' or 'bar', but
+not from 'baz'".
A special notation "'<commit1>'..'<commit2>'" can be used as a
short-hand for "{caret}'<commit1>' '<commit2>'". For example, either of
$ git rev-list A...B
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
-'git-rev-list' is a very essential git program, since it
+'rev-list' is a very essential git command, since it
provides the ability to build and traverse commit ancestry graphs. For
this reason, it has a lot of different options that enables it to be
used by commands as different as 'git-bisect' and