http://invisible-island.net/
Copyright © 1996-2012,2013 by Thomas E. Dickey
diffstat reads the output of diff and displays a histogram of the insertions, deletions, and modifications per-file. It is useful for reviewing large, complex patch files.
I originally wrote this in 1992, along with an associated utility rcshist, to trace the change history of collections of files. Since then, I've found it most useful for summarizing source patches.
See the changelog for details:
Initially, I used diff and
diffstat in a script named
diff-patch. In 1994, I started using makepatch which gave
more consistent results.
It was not until early 1996 that there was much attention by others to the tool. At that point, developers on both XFree86 and ncurses mailing lists started using it.
One of those developers (Tony Nugent) pointed it out to Linus Torvalds in July 1996, on linux.dev.kernel. Much later (in 2002), it was documented as part of the process for submitting Linux kernel patches for BitKeeper (BK) in Linux 2.4.20. Linus commented on the process:
Ok, pulled. But _please_ do this the regular way next time. There's even a script to help you do it in linux/Documentation/BK-usage/bk-mak-sum, which does it all for you for BK patches.
(many people end up doing their own thing, you don't have to use that particular script, of course. But the important thing I want is that the _email_ should contain enough information to make a good first pass judgement on what the patch does, and in particular it is important for me to see what a "bk pull" will actually change.)
That's why the "diffstat" is important to me if I do a BK pull – and why I want to see the patches as plaintext if I apply stuff to generic files..
Later, in 2005 Linus wrote git, which has the ability to generate a diffstat. There are some enhancements (git is able to track moves and renames of files).