Re: git-status too verbose?

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Mar 7, 2006, 00:21 UTC
Message-ID: <7vacc36r4v.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <38b80e980603040952j15152a21h2c903bd011d7e905@mail.gmail.com>

"Eric Jaffe" <jaffe.eric@gmail.com> writes:

Show 8 quoted lines

> I was wondering if anyone else thinks that git-status should be more
> like "git-diff --name-status". That is,
>   # A a/newfile.c
>   # M a/oldfile.c
>
> instead of
>   # new file: a/newfile.c
>   # modified: a/oldfile.c

Why do people think mysterious single letter abbreviation is better than spelled out words in an output meant for human consumption?

The tag letters you get from "ls-files -t" are inconsistent with what you would get from all the other git tools for historical reasons, so if you want to do a single-letter abbreviation, you first need to come up with a set of letters and translate the output from ls-files -t into that.

Although I personally like Carl's suggestion a lot, I am still ambivalent about it a bit.

I agree that it would be useful if we had a tool that showed the two status that matter for each file, grouped together on one line, e.g.

			HEAD->index	index->files
	------------------------------------------------
	hello.c		unmodified      modified
        world.c		modified	unmodified
	frotz.c		new		unmodified
        ...
	garbage.c~	???		n/a

for the current index file and the current HEAD commit.

You obviously need to learn how to read it though. The first column means what you _would_ commit if you just said "git commit" without doing anything else now; the second column is what you _could_ commit if you did some update-index and then said "git commit" (or ran "git commit" with paths arguments).

I think it is a valid view for people who know how internally git barebone porcelain works using git lowlevel, and to them (including me), the above is more concise and appear useful.

But I am not sure if it is appropriate for "git status", which is the tool for commit-preview. The index "git status" is showing is the index you would get if you were to run "git commit" with the same set of parameters, exactly for that reason (e.g. "git status -a -v" would see "unmodified" for all tracked paths in index->files column in the above output).