Re: [PATCH] Implement git-staged, an alias for 'git diff --cached'.

From: David Kågedal <davidk@lysator.liu.se>
Date: Oct 29, 2008, 20:24 UTC
Message-ID: <87abcnb14c.fsf@krank.kagedal.org>
In-Reply-To: <878ws7w8xc.fsf@iki.fi>

Teemu Likonen <tlikonen@iki.fi> writes:

Show 17 quoted lines

> Wincent Colaiuta (2008-10-29 18:42 +0100) wrote:
>
>> El 29/10/2008, a las 18:03, Johannes Schindelin escribió:
>>> I completely disagree. If the existing set of commands causes
>>> confusion, we need to deprecate those parts and add new commands.
>>> Even if we have a ton of commands already.
>>
>> The confusion isn't at the command level; it's at the switch/option
>> level. The solution isn't to add a new command.
>
> I don't remember being confused in particular area but I think it's a
> _very_ good thing that the following three are behind the same "diff"
> command:
>
>     git diff
>     git diff --cached       (or --staged)
>     git diff HEAD

One irregularity hear is that there is no way to explicitly say what you want to compare against the index (the staging area). Diff compares two things to each other, and a more regular and general way to express what it does would be something like

    git diff STAGE WORKTREE   (like "git diff" today)
    git diff HEAD WORKTREE    (like "git diff HEAD" today)
    git diff WORKTREE HEAD    (like "git diff -R HEAD" today)
    git diff HEAD STAGE       (like "git diff --cached" today)
    git diff commit STAGE     (like "git diff --cached commit" today)

To me, it isn't obvious that --cached changes the thing you *compare* rather than the thing you compare *against*. I think it would be useful to have a way of explicitly stating what you compare, something like what I wrote above, and then having useful shortcuts for common cases (like that no arguments compares the work tree against the stage).

-- 
David Kågedal