On Fri, Jun 16, 2017 at 4:41 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > HEAD is, unless you are about to create a root commit, always a > commit and not other kind of commit-ish, so there is no need to say > "or commit-ish" here. I apologize for my errant terminology, I thought commitish was what the abbreviated SHA1 was called. My proposal was to show either the full SHA1 or the abbreviated SHA1 in the output of `git status`. > What would you do differently, after seeing this random-looking > 40-character string, based on what it is? Do you know recent commit > object names by heart and can tell, immediately when you see 88ce3..., > "ah, that was me fixing foo", as opposed to e140f7a... that is a > different change you can immediately identify? I obviously do not know recent commits by heart - the aim is to be able to easily copy & paste or visually compare against another value. Aside from the practical implications of having the commit SHA included in the output of `git status`, I have also pointed out my ideological reasons for it. `git status` currently prints an incomplete picture of the local repository state, and without an indication of _which_ commit HEAD currently is, the remainder of the content "expires" and is of no use at some later date. Looking back, I probably should have started with that. `git status` gives the status of the _relative_ current state of the local repository without printing any information that can be used as an _absolute_ reference to "frame" the results of the `git status` command. The relative state of a repository is useless for any sort of machine or human analysis, since it would require the state of both the cached remote and local indices to be identical to be of any use. If I run `git status`, make, commit, and push some changes, then run `git status` once more, the output of the command can be identical to the previous run, _even though the actual state of the repo has changed_ which is... less than useful and potentially misleading. Yes, anyone familiar with git knows that the output of `git status` is only showing you a summary of the diff of the working tree vs HEAD. My argument is that all it would take is another 8 characters appending to the "On branch xxxx" line to make it an infinitely more useful command. Thank you, Mahmoud Al-Qudsi NeoSmart Technologies
