From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Sat, 08 May 2010 05:24:57 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH/RFC] Add [] as an alias for a reference to the empty tree
Message-ID: <7vhbmjc6dy.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20100508045319.GD14998@coredump.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

> Based on past discussions, I suspect other people would be interested
> in:
>
>   $ git diff [index] HEAD
>   $ git diff HEAD [index]
>   $ git diff [working-tree] [index]
>
> etc. I don't think I would want to type those all the time,...

If you go that route, why not use INDEX and WORKTREE (all caps) to at
least avoid the brackets?  I am not personally interested in [] at all,
but as part of that repertoire of syntactic sugar tokens EMPTY might be
able to sneak in [*1*]

[Footnote]

*1* Without that "[]" syntax, the feature is "Meh" for me, but with the
syntax, it becomes "Yuck".  The reason I am not interested in the feature
is because I don't see much value in running "git diff EMPTY <anything>".
Perhaps "git archive" might be what the user really wants to find.