From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2008 08:41:47 GMT
Subject: Re: Call Me Gitless
Message-ID: <7viqtukbec.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LNX.1.00.0808181628420.19665@iabervon.org>

Daniel Barkalow <barkalow@iabervon.org> writes:

> On Mon, 18 Aug 2008, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> ...
>>     If we had a configuration for "index-free" people, that changes the
>>     semantics of "git add" to register object name of an empty blob when a
>>     new path is added, makes "git add" for existing blobs a no-op, but
>>     keeps "git commit -a" and "git commit <paths>" to operate as they
>>     currently do, then people with such configuration could:
>> 
>> 	$ >new-file
>>         $ git add new-file
>>         $ edit old-file
>>         $ edit new-file
>>         $ git diff
>> 
>>     to always see what's the difference from the HEAD is with "git diff",
>>     and any of these three:
>> 
>> 	$ git commit -a
>>         $ git commit old-file
>>         $ git commit old-file new-file
>> 
>>     would work as expected by them.  We still need to support the three
>>     diff variants for normal git people, but people who do not use index
>>     do not have to know the two variants ("git diff" vs "git diff HEAD");
>>     such a change could be argued as a "UI improvement" [*1*].
>
> I think that having the possibility of adding an empty blob (or maybe a 
> magical "nothing currently here but git-ls-files includes it") would be 
> preferrable to a no-index mode.

I am not sure if you are really saying something different from what I am
saying.  We'll see after this three patch series.  The first one is an
unrelated bugfix (but the bug won't trigger with existing callers -- only
triggered with the added codepath).