Re: git-diff: must --exit-code work with --ignore* options?

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: May 22, 2009, 16:14 UTC
Message-ID: <7vvdnt869j.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <87k549dyne.fsf@meyering.net>

Jim Meyering <jim@meyering.net> writes:

Show 15 quoted lines

> git-diff's --quiet option works how I'd expect with --ignore-space-at-eol
> as long as I'm also using --no-index:
>
>     $ echo>b; echo \ >c; git diff --no-index --quiet --ignore-space-at-eol b c \
>       && echo good
>     good
>
> But in what I think of as normal operation (i.e., without --no-index),
> --exit-code (or --quiet) makes git-diff say there were differences,
> even when they have been ignored:
>
>     # do this in an empty directory
>     $ git init -q; echo>k; git add .; git commit -q -m. .; echo \ >k
>     $ git diff --ignore-space-at-eol --quiet || echo bad
>     bad

I am slightly torn about this, in that I can picture myself saying that this is unintuitive on some different days, but not today ;-)

If you look at the output (i.e. no --quiet), you would see that the blob changes are still reported for the path. E.g. you would see something like...

	$ git diff --ignore-space-at-eol
        diff --git a/k b/k
        index 8b13789..8d1c8b6 100644

The "index" line is still showing that there _is_ a difference.

The --ignore-* options are there merely to tell git what changes are not worth _showing_ in the textual part of the patch, in order to cut down the amount of the output. It never affects the outcome.

So if anything, I think --no-index codepath is what's buggy; if it does not report the blob difference that is a different matter, though.