Re: [PATCH 0/6] "git commit --dry-run" updates

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Aug 17, 2009, 15:57 UTC
Message-ID: <7vljlixwkz.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <200908171201.43343.trast@student.ethz.ch>

Thomas Rast <trast@student.ethz.ch> writes:

Show 9 quoted lines

> If it's not too much work, it would be nice to somehow detect if -u
> can have any influence at all.  For example,
>
>   $ git status bar
>   # Not currently on any branch.
>   nothing to commit (use -u to show untracked files)
>
> is a bit misleading if 'bar' is tracked because adding a -u won't make
> any difference.

It is an issue shared with the original "git status".  Running

    git init
    >file
    git add file
    git commit -m initial
    git status -uno

will give the same "use -u to show" message.

The thing is, "use -u to show" is because you told git not to check if there is any untracked file. Whoever added -uno wanted not to run the recursive read_directory() to find them.

The message says "you told me not to check about untracked files, so I can not show you any, because I did not check; if you want, please use -u to tell me to check so that I can show them to you".

It is not about "we know that there are untracked files but you told me not to show it, so I am not telling". We simply do not know at the point we give that message. In other words, conditional removal of that message is fundamentally incompatible with the use of -uno.