Re: 'commit -a' safety (was: Re: Please default to 'commit -a' when no changes were added)

From: Petr Baudis <pasky@suse.cz>
Date: Apr 24, 2010, 16:42 UTC
Message-ID: <20100424164247.GM3563@machine.or.cz>
In-Reply-To: <AC853FF9-6723-4824-BB2C-E7E8F79AA95E@wincent.com>

On Sat, Apr 24, 2010 at 01:10:24PM +0200, Wincent Colaiuta wrote:

> El 24/04/2010, a las 11:40, Jakub Narebski escribió:
> > I'd like for 'git commit -a' to *fail* if there are staged changes for
> > tracked files, excluding added, removed and renamed files.

Thanks for this suggestion, this is exactly what I wanted to propose! +1 here.

I think this could even be made a default in some time, I don't see any useful workflows this could prevent and adding -f is trivial enough for those who really want to go forward.

> For me this is going to far. While we don't want to make it _easy_ for users to shoot themselves in the foot, neither do we want to make it difficult or impossible for them to get the tool to do things that _might_ be a mistake. And what's the risk here? Accidentally committing too much is not a destructive change, and can be easily undone.

Have you ever done this mistake? If you have done some extensive index editing, it is actually a major PITA to restore, and can be even destructive if your index and working tree are too much out-of-sync (this does happen to me not so seldom while I also use -a a lot for trivial commits).

> IMO, the fact that the commit message editor is populated with a list of changed files that will be included in the commit is enough for people to see what's actually going to happen.

BTW, I almost always use -m instead of the commit editor. ;-)

-- 
				Petr "Pasky" Baudis
When I feel like exercising, I just lie down until the feeling
goes away.  -- xed_over