Re: Better handling of local changes in 'gitk'?

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jul 12, 2007, 20:43 UTC
Message-ID: <7vir8ptksi.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.0.999.0707121214420.20061@woody.linux-foundation.org>

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> writes:

Show 11 quoted lines

> I like how gitk shows the local changes as an unnamed commit at the top, 
> but what I *don't* like is how it just ignored the difference between 
> stuff that has been added to the index, and stuff that hasn't..
>
> It would be very nice to have *two* such commits (either or both of which 
> just disappear), where the top-most is the diff to the index, and the 
> second is the diff from the index to HEAD.
>
> That would not only be useful in general, it would be a wonderful way to 
> visually introduce people to the notion of what the staging area is all 
> about.

Interesting, as I was thinking about something similar when I typed "git show stash" by mistake. I meant to say "git stash show", but "git show stash" output actually was even closer to what I wanted to see.

"git stash" internally creates two commits, based on your HEAD:

         .----W
        /    / 
    ---H----I

Here, W keeps the state of the working tree, I is the index state and H is the HEAD. Commit I is direct child of H, Commit W is an evil merge between H and I, and that is what is kept as refs/stash, so "git show stash" would end up showing that merge in --cc format.