specifying ranges: we did not mean to make ".." an empty set

Either end of revision range operator can be omitted to default to HEAD,
as in "origin.." (what did I do since I forked) or "..origin" (what did
they do since I forked).  But the current parser interprets ".."  as an
empty range "HEAD..HEAD", and worse yet, because ".." does exist on the
filesystem, we get this annoying output:

  $ cd Documentation/howto
  $ git log .. ;# give me recent commits that touch Documentation/ area.
  fatal: ambiguous argument '..': both revision and filename
  Use '--' to separate filenames from revisions

Surely we could say "git log ../" or even "git log -- .." to disambiguate,
but we shouldn't have to.

Helped-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 7 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/revisions.txt b/Documentation/revisions.txt
index dc0070bcb7..69d996bc38 100644
--- a/Documentation/revisions.txt
+++ b/Documentation/revisions.txt
@@ -213,6 +213,13 @@ of 'r1' and 'r2' and is defined as
 It is the set of commits that are reachable from either one of
 'r1' or 'r2' but not from both.
 
+In these two shorthands, you can omit one end and let it default to HEAD.
+For example, 'origin..' is a shorthand for 'origin..HEAD' and asks "What
+did I do since I forked from the origin branch?"  Similarly, '..origin'
+is a shorthand for 'HEAD..origin' and asks "What did the origin do since
+I forked from them?"  Note that '..' would mean 'HEAD..HEAD' which is an
+empty range that is both reachable and unreachable from HEAD.
+
 Two other shorthands for naming a set that is formed by a commit
 and its parent commits exist.  The 'r1{caret}@' notation means all
 parents of 'r1'.  'r1{caret}!' includes commit 'r1' but excludes