Re: [RFC/PATCH] shortstatus v1

From: Michael J Gruber <git@drmicha.warpmail.net>
Date: Feb 10, 2009, 11:29 UTC
Message-ID: <49916524.4000400@drmicha.warpmail.net>
In-Reply-To: <20090210110330.GB12089@coredump.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King venit, vidit, dixit 10.02.2009 12:03:

> On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 01:51:07AM +0100, Tuncer Ayaz wrote:

...

>   3. What advantage does this have over just doing:
> 
>        (git diff --name-status;
>         git diff --cached --name-status) | sort -k2

That is fine, except that it can't list untracked files.

Show 5 quoted lines

> What options are available? It looks like this is intimately tied with
> "commit", which I think is one of the _shortcomings_ of the current
> status. It means the command line options are non-intuitive for what
> people generally want to say: "what is changed, possibly limiting to
> some path".

Right now, "git status" is basically "git commit --dry-run", which may or may not be good, but certainly is not what people coming from other vcs expect. I would suggest having "git commit -n" replace "git status" if I hadn't done so already or if I dared to (I can't remember ;) ).

The softer approach was naming "shortstatus" what those people would expect for "status".

The "git diff" based solution does almost everything, but back then it wasn't clear how to get at the untracked and ignored files. In fact, that would have the benefit that output from "git diff --name-status commitA commitB" is guaranteed to stay consistent with "git diff --name-status HEAD WORKTREE", "git diff --name-status INDEX WORKTREE" and the three-way diff between HEAD, INDEX and WORKTREE which shortstatus really is (WORKTREE meaning full wt with untrcaked/ignored files).

"git ls-files" may do but has a different set of mode characters. I think that sums up what preceeded Junio's patch from October.

Michael