Junio C Hamano wrote: > Anyway, I think the time to commit is too late to save somebody > who does not understand the index. How would you explain why > you sometimes need to use -A and sometimes -a? I guess what I really want is "a smarter -a". > That is why I > suggested to make "git pull" and "git merge" refuse to work if > there are local changes for novice users, where the definition > of novice is "git commit -a" is the only way to make a commit. > We can have [core] novice = yes in .git/config for that. > > If somebody does not understand the index, if the merge is > prevented because the local change does conflict with it, how > would you explain why sometimes you can merge and sometimes you > cannot? By the same logic that is already implemented. "pull refuses to pull changes to files that are modified but not committed". >> For example, we had a case where we absolutely _had_ to keep >> an ugly workaround in the tree, in a file not otherwise >> edited, but we definitely did not want to commit the kludge, > Your example is a very ill-thought out one. > > If you are leaving the uncommitable kludge around, you cannot be > using "commit -a" with the normal non-merge workflow. Why > would you worry about not being able to do "commit -a" on a > merge then? The indexless working mode means you know two kinds of commits. "git commit -a" or "git commit FILE..". The uncommitted kludge hanging around means people listed file names. The case where the merge differs is that it's not just a few files, and they didn't even really know what files to list. And "git status" showed them something they were not used to seeing. > For the beginning user without index, I would rewrite your > scenario like this. > ... > - Jack stashes away what he has been working on and cleans up > his mess. > > git diff >P.diff > git checkout HEAD A B C ... > - Jack then reapplies what he stashed away with "git apply P.diff" > and keeps working. > > Maybe "git stash" command that does "git diff --full-index" with > some frills, and "git unstash" command which does an equivalent > of "git am -3" would help this workflow (bare "git apply" does > not do the three-way merge like am does). Oh, I'd love to have a quick stash, that's what we actually ended up doing a lot. Although I'd rather see a real implementation use a branch and not just a diff file, but.. yes please. Although, "git stash" and "git unstash" are yet another command to add to the newbie set, and I just complained about the size of the set ;) -- Inoi Oy, Tykistökatu 4 D (4. krs), FI-20520 Turku, Finland http://www.inoi.fi/ Mobile +358 40 762 5656 - : send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html