From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 13 Nov 2010 20:21:46 GMT
Subject: Re: Using a different index and HEAD
Message-ID: <20101113202146.GA16920@burratino>
In-Reply-To: <20101113194128.GA8878@nibiru.local>

Enrico Weigelt wrote:

> I didnt have time for a deeper look yet, but I'll try to explain
> my ideas a bit more:
>
> Suppose I choose to work on an branch "one" (which probably is
> synced to some remote). That will create some temporary (local)
> WIP branch, where
[...]
>              Now I click some "commit" button and it asks me what
> exactly to commit - I now can interactively selected changes to
> be committed (maybe even on single changelets within a file),
> they'll be squashed together (maybe involving some rebase magic)
> and an commit final commit object is created on the "one" branch.

Ah, that is completely different. :)  Your tools would be

	GIT_INDEX_FILE=$GIT_DIR/wip-index; export GIT_INDEX_FILE
	git update-index ...
	git write-tree
	git commit-tree ...
	git update-ref ...
	git read-tree ...

none of which touch HEAD except the second to last one.

See the list of "low-level commands (plumbing)" and examples in
contrib/examples for more details.