Re: Question about "git commit -a"

> On 10/5/07, Andreas Ericsson <ae@op5.se> wrote:
>> Paolo Ciarrocchi wrote:
>>> 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 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.
> 
> Right.
> But in the scenario you described isn't enough to type "git commit -s".
> Why did you write "git commit -s A B E".
> 

> 
>>> $ 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.
> 
> Very interesting!
> 
>> 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.
> 
> Yeah, I see.
> Thanks for your comments Andreas, very appreciated.
> 
> Just to clarify my goal, since I had that interesting discussion with
> an hg user I started looking for simple examples of the usage of the
> "staging area" to be added to the introduction to git documentation.
> The role of the index/staging area seems to be something complex for a
> git newbie.
>