Re: 'commit -a' safety

> On Sat, 24 Apr 2010, Jakub Narebski wrote:
> 
> > First, this is to be optional safety, by default turned off.  So if you
> > do not have problems with situation where you accidentally use 
> > 'git commit -a' instead of 'git commit', committing not what you wanted
> > and prepared, you simply do not turn it on.
> 
> In which case it is worthless.  No one will turn this feature on if they 
> don't fully understand what it entails, and those who do understand it 
> are probably not the people who would actually benefit from it.

> > Second, to be more exact the safety would be triggered only if staged
> > change _differs_ from what is in working area.  Therefore
> > 
> >   $ git add file
> >   $ git commit -a
> > 
> > would not trigger this safety, while
> > 
> >   $ git add file
> >   $ edit file
> >   $ git commit -a
> >   fatal: There are staged changes
> > 
> > would trigger it.
> 
> Much better yet would be a warning at the top of the summary message in 
> the commit text editor.  This way you won't introduce an incompatible 
> and potentially annoying behavior that no one is likely to opt-in for, 
> and the warning will give a hint that you might be losing some 
> intermediate state if you don't abort the commit.