> When you pipe the results of `git status` to `git add`, you are > effectively using the `-u` option, since that will only ever list files > that are tracked. I'm not sure what you mean by this; `git status` lists untracked files. For instance, if I `touch foo.txt` and `git add -u .` then foo.txt will not be staged. But if I pipe the changes from `git status` into `git add` then it will be added. > The untracked cache is not used when you specify > a pathspec on the command line because in the general case, it doesn't > have to be just `.` and it could be something like a match on an > attribute or a glob pattern, which would make the code very complex in > dealing with that case. Is there a reason `git add .` couldn't use the untracked cache even if other pathspecs didn't? I have to imagine that `.` is by far the most common pathspec used and there would be value in speeding that up. > You can, of course, continue to use it, but you > can't expect them to perform identically. I wouldn't expect them to perform identically, but given how much faster it runs when piping in the data from `git status` I think it's reasonable to expect it to run much faster than it does today.
