Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > Matthieu Moy <Matthieu.Moy@xxxxxxx> writes: > >>> "git-status $args" on the other hand is a preview of "what would >>> happen if I say 'git-commit $args'", and in order to compute >>> that, you would fundamentally need to be able to write into the >>> object store. In a special case of giving empty $args it can be >>> read-only. >> >> Can you give an example where it _could_ not be read-only? > > Think of what "git commit -a" would have to do. I don't know whether it was a typo, but we're not talking about "commit", but "status". > It needs to hash and deposit a new object for blobs that have been > modified. Where do those new blob object go? git-status _does_ hash and deposit new objects, but it doesn't _need_ to. It can very well show you what "commit -a" would do without actually doing it. A trivial (and very stupid, yes) way to do this would be cp -r . /tmp/git/ cd /tmp/git git-status -a There's no visible side-effects for the user. IIRC, git-status -a does actually "git-add" the modified objects, but does so in a temporary index, so I believe the objects you leave in the objects database are not pointed to by anyone (indeed, I just checked, git-fsck --unreachable shows the dangling blob), and are not really useful (but will probably be used later when you run commit or add). > Maybe in a theoretical ideal world, you might prefer to > reverting back to the stat-dirty original index to make > git-status appear a read-only operation, with continued degraded > performance. You are welcome to reimplement it that way, and > the patch should be trivial (while git-commit.sh is still a > script, at least) but that is not what we did. You still didn't understand my point about the difference between user-specification and internal behavior. I'm very happy with git-status updating the stat information in the index, since it is not suppose to have user-visible side effects (it has with the current empty-diff-for-touched-files behavior of git-diff). Now, at that point, if I still didn't manage to show you the difference between user-visible behavior and implementation, I believe I have no better thing to do than giving up. -- 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
