From: Junio C Hamano Date: Fri, 03 Aug 2007 21:50:15 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH] Add --show-touched option to show "diff --git" line when contents are unchanged Message-ID: <7v1wekmgo8.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net> In-Reply-To: Matthieu Moy writes: > Also, is there any particular reason not to update the index stat > information when files are found to be identical? Very much --- diff is a read-only operation. "git-status $args" on the other hand is a preview of "what would happen if I say 'git-commit $args'", and in order to compute that, you would fundamentally need to be able to write into the object store. In a special case of giving empty $args it can be read-only. The commit Dscho quoted earlier was to hack that around so that "git-status" can pretend to be a read-only operation in a repository you do not have write permission to.