Re: Question about "git commit -a"

From: Andreas Ericsson <ae@op5.se>
Date: Oct 5, 2007, 08:52 UTC
Message-ID: <4705FB52.3030208@op5.se>
In-Reply-To: <4d8e3fd30710050139j45a5a924t5c048994e3457c5f@mail.gmail.com>

Paolo Ciarrocchi wrote:

Show 25 quoted lines

> On 10/4/07, Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> On Fri, 5 Oct 2007, Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy wrote:
>>
>>> On 10/4/07, Wincent Colaiuta <win@wincent.com> wrote:
>>>>> Am I wrong?
>>>> About it being a majority, yes, I suspect so.
>>>>
>>> Maybe in the next survey we should include question "do you usually do
>>> 'git commit' or 'git commit -a'" :-)
>> Not meaning to discourage you, but it is a known fact that Linus does "git
>> commit" without "-a" quite often.
>>
>> And if that were not bad enough for your plan, I myself omit "-a"
>> regularly.  So you would get a veto from me, too.
> 
> So you are used to do something like (please correct me if I'm wrong):
> - modify A
> - modify B
> - modify C
> - modify D
> - modify E
> 
> $ git A B E

This isn't really a valid command. I'm not sure where you got it from.

> $ git add A B E (A, B and E are now in the staging area)
> $ git commit -m "I just modified A,B and E"

I do something like that, except that for full-file commits I'd rather say

	git commit -s A B E

I never pass -m to git commit. It's too easy to get into habit of being sloppy with historic documentation that way.

> $ git C D

Again not a valid command, but...

> $ git add C D (C and D are now in the staging area)
> $ git commit -m "I just modified C and D"
>

See above :)

There's also the times when I hack on some feature and find some small bug/easy-to-write-feature, so I make the change for that other thing, swap to a different branch and do 'git commit -s --interactive' to just break out that small fix.

Or if I have to add some logic to some other function in a file I've modified for other purposes and want it to be two separate commits, I just make the change and then run 'git commit --interactive' to make it two separate commits.

I just don't do 'git commit -a' for the same reason I don't do 'git commit -m', really. It tends to be habit-forming, and bisect has saved my arse enough times for me to *want* my changes to be small and isolated. Debugging a 5-line patch is so much more pleasant than debugging a 30k-lines one that spans over several different files.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson@op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231