Re: Some information that git diff saves and that git status does not

From: Dmitry Potapov <dpotapov@gmail.com>
Date: Mar 9, 2010, 08:20 UTC
Message-ID: <20100309082029.GG31105@dpotapov.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <4B95F183.7000708@gmail.com>

On Tue, Mar 09, 2010 at 07:58:11AM +0100, Sergio Callegari wrote:

> 
> I actually did not know about the
> 
> update-index --refresh

This is a plumbing commmand, which normally users should not use directly, but when you copy your repo by hands or do something like that, you may need it (or use "git diff").

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> 
> but now I have the relevant information its name sounds obvious.
> And I suspected something like inode data entering the game.
> 
> As a matter of fact, I was obtaining the same effect with git diff.

Because "git diff" refreshes the cached stat information internally, in the same way as "update-index --refresh". Junio wrote about this recently: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/141708

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> 
> What was appearing to me as a quirk is that:
> 
> 1) If you do not refresh the index, git works perfectly all the
> same.  For instance, git status shows the right info. Only it is not
> that fast anymore, since everytime it needs to runs the filters on
> all the files.
> 2) git status does not refresh the index, while other commands like
> git diff do.

Historically, "git status" was just the dry-run mode of "git commit". I do not think that "git commit" should refresh the index. But in Git 1.7, "git status" is no longer the dry-run mode of "git commit", so I see no reason why it does not refresh the cached stat info internally...

Dmitry