On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 4:11 AM, Miles Bader <miles@xxxxxxx> wrote: >> Do you think it would be valuable to introduce --added as a synonym >> for --cached and slowly steer documentation to encourage the latter >> in place of the former? > > "--added" sounds very awkward though; "--staged" is much more natural. I should note _why_ this is so: The main problem is well-known -- that "git add" is a bit overloaded and slightly awkward in some case (e.g., to remove a file, you need to add it...). But whatever, it works well enough, because people are used to it. However in the case of git diff, if one sees "git diff --added", it sounds like it means "show me a diff of added files" -- but the term "added files" is ambiguous; and the fact that "git add" is in fact, overloaded with multiple meanings doesn't really help, the basic ambiguity makes "git diff --added" awkward and unclear. A far better way would be to (1) make "git diff --staged" an alias for "git-diff --cached" (2) start promoting "git stage" in documentation, instead of "git add". -Miles -- Cat is power. Cat is peace. -- To unsubscribe from this list: 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