Git: How can I find a commit that most closely matches a directory?

Question

Someone took a version (unknown to me) of Moodle, applied many changes within a directory, and released it (tree here).

How can I determine which commit of t

Answer 1

How about using git to create a patch from all versions of 1.8. and 1.9 to this new release. Then you could see which patch makes more 'sense'.

For example, if the patch 'removes' many methods, then it is probably not this release, but one before. If the patch has many sections that don't make sense as a single edit, then it probably isn't this release either.

And so on... In reality, unfortunately, there doesn't exist an algorithm to do this perfectly. I will have to be some heuristic.