How to “git show” a merge commit with combined diff output even when every changed file agrees with one of the parents?

Question

After doing a \"simple\" merge (one without conflicts), git show usually only shows something like

commit 0e1329e551a5700614a2a34d8101e92fd9f2ca         


        

Answer 1

No, there is no way to do this with git show. But it would certainly be nice sometimes, and it would probably be relatively easy to implement in the git source code (after all, you just have to tell it to not trim out what it thinks is extraneous output), so the patch to do so would probably be accepted by the git maintainers.

Be careful what you wish for, though; merging a branch with a one-line change that was forked three months ago will still have a huge diff versus the mainline, and so such a full diff would be almost completely unhelpful. That's why git doesn't show it.