Re: BUG in git diff-index

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Mar 31, 2016, 14:27 UTC
Message-ID: <20160331142704.GC31116@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <CAJxkE8SVF_ikHqDCh6eHExq=seitHPVpxW2GmPo40jtqWvz1JQ@mail.gmail.com>

On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 10:12:07AM -0400, Andy Lowry wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> What I'm actually after is a tree-to-filesystem comparison, regardless
> of index. I've currently got a "diff" thrown in as a "work-around"
> before "diff-index", but  now I understand it's not a workaround at
> all. If there's a better way to achieve what I'm after, I'd appreciate
> a tip. Otherwise I'll just change the comments explaining why there's
> a "diff" in my script.

If your workaround is just to refresh the index, then you can do "git update-index --refresh", rather than diff.

I don't think there is a plumbing command to do a direct filesystem-to-tree comparison without having an index at all. "git diff <treeish>" claims in the documentation to do so, but besides not being plumbing, I think it is really just doing the same thing as diff-index, under the hood. The index is a pretty fundamental part of git's view of the working tree.

-Peff