Re: [PATCH 3/4] add -u: only show pathless 'add -u' warning when changes exist outside cwd

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Mar 19, 2013, 19:06 UTC
Message-ID: <20130319190624.GB3655@google.com>
In-Reply-To: <7v620nl99g.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Matthieu Moy <Matthieu.Moy@grenoble-inp.fr> writes:

Show 15 quoted lines

>> No time to review the code now. I thought about implementing something
>> like that, but did not do it because I didn't want the change in the
>> code to be too big. At some point, we'll have to remove the warning and
>> it's easier with my version than with yours. But the "damage" to the
>> code do not seem too big, so that's probably OK and will actually reduce
>> the pain for some users.
>
> Getting these warnings is a *good* thing.
>
> You may happen to have no changed path outside the current directory
> with this particular invocation of "git add -u", or you may do, or
> you may not *even* remember if you touched the paths outside.
>
> Training your fingers to type "git add -u ." without having to even
> think, is primarily to help the last case.

The problem is that these warnings are triggering way too often. It is like the story of the boy who cried "wolf": instead of training people to type "git add -u .", we are training them to ignore warnings.

I personally often find myself in the following situation:

	$ cd repowithdeepsubdirs/third_party/git
	$ ... hack hack hack ...
	$ git add -u

The result is a pile of warning text that I cannot convince myself not to ignore because I already *knew* that the only changes present were under the cwd. The old and new "git add -u" behaviors always have the same effect in this case, so the warning is not relevant to me. So I find myself being trained to ignore the warning.

Presumably habitual Java hackers that do their work in a com/long/package/name subdirectory of the toplevel would find this even more annoying.

One important exception is that if "git add -u :/" is slow, users need to learn to run "git add -u ." to speed the operation up. But I think that is intuitive already. Running a full-tree diff which slows down the code that decides whether to print a warning is a good way to train people regarding how long to expect a plain "git add -u" to take.

Hoping that clarifies, Jonathan