Re: Proposed git mv behavioral change

From: Shawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
Date: Oct 20, 2007, 06:36 UTC
Message-ID: <20071020063628.GV14735@spearce.org>
In-Reply-To: <20071020062400.GA30388@coredump.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> No, I meant more that the state you have staged will never have actually
> existed in your working tree, so you could not possibly have tested it.
> However, it may be that the changes you are trying to avoid staging are
> trivial, and you're willing to accept that. And git shouldn't stand in
> your way.
> 
> And it sounds like you don't necessarily want to make a _commit_ out of
> this, you just want to keep working and not have git-mv munge your
> staged state.

Yea, I want the same thing.  :-)

And not because I commit things that weren't tested. Its because I do mini code reviews for small hunks at a time. I stage things I have looked at, and keep things I'm still unsure about unstaged. But before I commit I make sure my `git diff` output is empty, so I know that any tests I do now will match what I have when I run git-commit.

So lets say I make a change in my Makefile that changes the name of a source file to be more descriptive of that file's contents. I've reviewed the Makefile change *and* done the file rename, but I'm still not done reviewing the stuff in the file. (Yea, maybe that should be two different commits, but maybe not, lets not get into that as it depends very much on context.)

Today I move the file, then unstage the hunks I'm not sure about, then go back and restage them. Annoying. It really disrupts my workflow.

The killer feature in Git for me is the index.  That sucker saves
me on a daily basis as it lets me organize "this i'm happy with,
this i'm not" while I'm in the middle of making a single new commit.
Today git-mv robs me of it.

-- 
Shawn.