Re: [PATCH] git-diff: Add --staged as a synonym for --cached.

From: Avery Pennarun <apenwarr@gmail.com>
Date: Nov 12, 2008, 15:46 UTC
Message-ID: <32541b130811120746m7b0eadd3y1240d1252dbd441d@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.1.00.0811121205100.30769@pacific.mpi-cbg.de>

On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 6:10 AM, Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:

> Just in case anybody thought about creating tree objects on the fly and
> use their SHA-1s: that won't fly, as you can have unmerged entries in the
> index.  So STAGED.. is a _fundamentally_ different thing from HEAD^..

Hmm, I tried it to see, and "git diff --cached branchname" when there are unmerged entries looks like this (one line):

* Unmerged path /whatever/file

Which is pretty unhelpful anyhow (although I don't know what would be better). I can think of several ways to produce the same output, including using a magic SHA-1 that means "unmerged", or using a different filemode for unmerged files in the tree object, or actually including all three versions of the file in the tree object, each with a different mode. I admit that sounds pretty gross, though.

> Maybe we could play tricks with a special staged_commit (pretending to be
> a commit with SHA-1 000000... so that git log STAGED.. would do the same
> as plain git log, the rationale being that STAGED is no commit, so ^STAGED
> should be a nop).

I might have imagined STAGED to be a child commit of HEAD (or rather, its parents should be the same as if you did 'git commit'), but I don't really know for sure. In such a case, ^STAGED would definitely have a meaning.

Have fun,

Avery