Re: [BUG] - "git commit --amend" commits, when exiting the editor with no changes written

From: Jacob Helwig <jacob.helwig@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 2, 2010, 20:14 UTC
Message-ID: <8c9a061002021214j673afbc8vfa5d941fba518648@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <76c5b8581002021207y3eccdc19i9a4abcc3d04315f0@mail.gmail.com>

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 12:07, Eugene Sajine <euguess@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 15 quoted lines

> Hi,
>
> It seems to me it is a bug:
>
> When git commit --amend is executed it fires up vi so i can change the
> commit message. If I have something staged, then when I'm exiting vi
> using :q (without doing/writing any changes), it still commits
> everything staged with old message.
>
> I believe it should actually abort amending and return to the state
> before the "git commit --amend" was issued.
>
> Thanks,
> Eugene
>

I don't think this is actually the right way to go. A _very_ common use case for "commit --amend" is to add things to the previous commit, without changing the commit message at all. Yes, you can avoid having to fire up the editor at all in this case, but it's still a perfectly valid thing to want to do.

If you want to abort amending, and return to the state before the "git commit --amend", you can remove all non-comment lines (IE: write out an "empty" commit message), or have your editor exit with a non-zero exit code (Use ":cquit").

The comment block that comes up in your editor mentions this first method, explicitly. "..., and an empty message aborts the commit."

-Jacob