doc: patch-id: emphasize multi-patch processing

Emphasize that you can pass multiple patches or diffs to this command. git-patch-id(1) is an efficient pID–commit mapper, able to map thousands of commits in seconds. But discussions on the command seem to typically[1] use the standard loop-over-rev-list-and- shell-out pattern: for commit in rev-list: prepare a diff from commit | git patch-id This is unnecessary; we can bulk-process the patches: git rev-list --no-merges <ref> | git diff-tree --patch --stdin | git patch-id --stable The first version (translated to shell) takes a little over nine minutes for a commit history of about 78K commits.[2] The other one, by contrast, takes slightly less than a minute. Also drop “the” from “standard input”. † 1: https://stackoverflow.com/a/19758159 † 2: This is `master` of this repository on 2025-10-02 Signed-off-by: Kristoffer Haugsbakk <code@khaugsbakk.name> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

Kristoffer Haugsbakk committed Feb 14, 2026 at 12:55 UTC bfd125f64f86e78894d67c9eafdbae38779484bc
1 file changed +4 -3
Documentation/git-patch-id.adoc
+4 -3
@@ -3,7 +3,7 @@ git-patch-id(1)
3
4 NAME
5 ----
6 -git-patch-id - Compute unique ID for a patch
6 +git-patch-id - Compute unique IDs for patches
7
8 SYNOPSIS
9 --------
@@ -12,7 +12,7 @@ git patch-id [--stable | --unstable | --verbatim]
12
13 DESCRIPTION
14 -----------
15 -Read a patch from the standard input and compute the patch ID for it.
15 +Read patches from standard input and compute the patch IDs.
16
17 A "patch ID" is nothing but a sum of SHA-1 of the file diffs associated with a
18 patch, with line numbers ignored. As such, it's "reasonably stable", but at
@@ -25,7 +25,8 @@ When dealing with `git diff-tree --patch` output, it takes advantage of
25 the fact that the patch is prefixed with the object name of the
26 commit, and outputs two 40-byte hexadecimal strings. The first
27 string is the patch ID, and the second string is the commit ID.
28 -This can be used to make a mapping from patch ID to commit ID.
28 +This can be used to make a mapping from patch ID to commit ID for a
29 +set or range of commits.
30
31 OPTIONS
32 -------