From: Alastair McGowan-Douglas <altreus@altre.us>
Date: Thu, 17 Sep 2015 09:44:30 GMT
Subject: git status -u is mildly astonishing
Message-ID: <20150917104430.5dd73ae1@dev-05>

Hi list,

Today I found what I thought was a bug in git status:

https://paste.fedoraproject.org/268333/42480833/

It seemed that the argument to -u was being ignored. It turns out that
'no' was not actually being considered an argument to -u in the first
place.

The documentation supports this:

       -u[<mode>], --untracked-files[=<mode>]
           Show untracked files.

There is no space here, but it is not obvious that it is *important*
that there is no space here.

The usage string implies that -- is used to disambiguate path specs
from option arguments

    git status [<options>...] [--] [<pathspec>...]

Therefore I would argue that -u is behaving differently from other
arguments (especially when considered across all git subcommands) by
only accepting its argument when not separated by a space. This at
least should be explicitly documented, but, preferably, should be
consistent with other arguments and use the -- token as the separator.

-Altreus