Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > Matthieu Moy <Matthieu.Moy@xxxxxxx> writes: > >> $ touch bar >> $ git diff >> diff --git a/bar b/bar <--- here ---< >> $ git status >> # On branch master >> nothing to commit (working directory clean) >> $ git diff <--- status updated >> the stat in the index. >> >> Is this intended, > > Yes. Very much so, intentionally, from very early days of git. > This serves as a reminder to the user that he started editing > but changed his mind to end up with the same contents as the > original, until the next "update-index --refresh" (which is > internally invoked from "status"). > > If the feature still makes sense in the modern world is a > different story, but I do find it useful. I understand that it can be usefull, but I really don't like having it by default (is there a way to deactivate it BTW?): I've hit this while working on a project, doing a lot of modifications through scripting (some regexp substitutions and such kinds of things). Then, git-diff shows me pages of "diff --git ...", and a few relevant entries in the middle of it. That's very bad from the usability point of view (I actually had some ~20 lines diff surrounded by 100+ irrelevant lines), and also kills performance: if a script touches a lot of files, I expect the next "diff" or "status" to be slow, but not the second next. Here, diff will be slow until I run git-status again. And I find the "reminder" feature very fragile. That means git-status is no longer a read-only operation for the user. As a user, I expect to be able to run git-status without changing the behavior of subsequent git commands, which is not the case here. That means for example that someone used to running git-diff /before/ git-status will get the reminder, while someone used to running git-diff /after/ git-status (which I find sensible, get an overview before getting the details of what you did) won't get it. Note also that this makes a difference between git-status (which updates the stat in the index) and git-status -a (which doesn't). That's an implementation detail that shouldn't be exposed to the user. Since I don't see any mention of this in the man pages for git-diff or git-status (I might have missed it), I wonder how many user actually ever used this as a feature. I'd be in favor of disabling this by default, and providing a configuration option and/or a command line option to diff to enable it. I can try writting a patch for this if people agree on the specification. -- Matthieu - 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
