Jeff King recently reinstated -p to suppress the default diffstat
(as -p used to work before
68daa64, about 14 months ago).
However, -p is also needed in combination with certain options
(e.g. --stat or --numstat) in order to produce any patch at all.
The documentation does not mention this.
Since the purpose of format-patch is to produce a patch that
can be emailed, it does not make sense that certain combination
of options will suppress the generation of the patch itself.
Therefore:
* Update 'git format-patch' to always generate a patch.
* Since the --name-only, --name-status, and --check suppresses
the generation of the patch, disallow those options,
and remove the description of them in the documentation.
* Remove the reference to -p in the description of -U.
* Remove the descriptions of the options that are synonyms for -p
plus another option (--patch-with-raw and --patch-with-stat).
* While at it, slightly tweak the description of -p itself
to say that it generates "plain patches", so that you can
think of -p as "plain patch" as an mnemonic aid.
Signed-off-by: Björn Gustavsson <bgustavsson@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>