Re: [PATCH 0/2] Making "git commit" to mean "git commit -a".

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Nov 29, 2006, 18:53 UTC
Message-ID: <7vzmaaozi8.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0611291234350.9647@xanadu.home>

Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org> writes:

> Of course amongst those newbies that didn't went away at this point 
> there will be those who decide to study further and come to the index 
> concept.  And I hope that we all agree that the index is a powerful but 
> still advanced concept that should not be presented up front.

I do not necessarily agree with the last sentence.

> But my point is: why not making a very little change to the default 
> commit behavior. Really little change involving -a being the default.

While I understand that is what you are suggesting, my point is that it will not stop at "commit -a". I already gave an example that "diff" needs to behave differently, if you want to match the behaviour of git consistently with "newbie" expectations.

If you go down that path, you would end up with two systems named git, that base their operations on two quite different mental models and behave differently. You do not want to go there; well at least I don't.

> The impact on newbies will be significant as they won't have to grok 
> everything at once to make sense of this -a we are telling them to use 
> blindly.

So don't tell them to use "-a" blindly. Teach them what it means using the terms they understand; we assume they haven't learned the "index" yet, so we would explain that "it is a way to commit all changes in the working tree". It is a short-hand so that they do not have to list all modified paths (or their git is recent enough, ".").

After they learn what it means and get used to using it, they will start wondering why we do not default to "-a". By that time, they would already have learned the config (because the first thing the tutorial teaches is user.name/user.email), and can use the alias mechanismk there to alias -a away.