Re: [RFC/PATCH] shortstatus v1

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Feb 10, 2009, 11:45 UTC
Message-ID: <20090210114506.GF12089@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <49916524.4000400@drmicha.warpmail.net>

On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 12:29:40PM +0100, Michael J Gruber wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> >   3. What advantage does this have over just doing:
> > 
> >        (git diff --name-status;
> >         git diff --cached --name-status) | sort -k2
> 
> That is fine, except that it can't list untracked files.

Well, neither does this patch:

  $ echo content >tracked &&
  > echo content >untracked &&
  > git add tracked &&
  > git shortstatus
  A           tracked

but you could easily include that:

  (git diff --name-status;
   git diff --cached --name-status;
   git ls-files --exclude-standard -o | sed 's/^/? /') | sort -k2

which is really more or less what the wt-status code does.

Note that I am not _against_ a convenient command for doing this. But I have to wonder why such a large patch is necessary when I can do it in three lines. I don't mind the C version being a little longer, but I wonder what advantage there is in using wt_status for this.

> Right now, "git status" is basically "git commit --dry-run", which may
> or may not be good, but certainly is not what people coming from other
> vcs expect. I would suggest having "git commit -n" replace "git status"
> if I hadn't done so already or if I dared to (I can't remember ;) ).

I would much prefer that, if it had been done that way from the beginning. But I think we are stuck with "git status" due to hysterical raisins.

> "git ls-files" may do but has a different set of mode characters. I
> think that sums up what preceeded Junio's patch from October.

But you only need to use it here to get the untracked files, so it doesn't matter what it says about modified files.

The big downside with the snippet I posted above is that it runs three separate commands that go through the index. In theory, you could do it in one pass. But wt-status _doesn't_ do that, since the diff infrastructure isn't there (a long time ago, Junio had an experimental parallel diff walker patch, but it never made it out of next).

-Peff