Re: [RFC PATCH 3/3] grep: add option to ignore sparsity patterns

> One more useful case to consider before we start adding SKIP_WORKTREE
> into the mix.  Let's say that you have three files:
>    fileA
>   fileB
>    fileC
> and all of them are tracked.  You have made edits to fileA and fileB,
> and ran 'rm fileC' (NOT 'git rm fileC', i.e. the deletion is not
> staged).  Now, you run 'git grep mystring'.  Quick question: Which
> files are searched for 'mystring'?  Well...
>   * REVISION and --cached were left out of the git grep command, so
> working tree files should be searched, not staged versions or versions
> from other commits
>  * No flags like --untracked or --no-exclude-standard were included,
> so only tracked files in the working tree should be searched
>   * There are two files in the working tree, both tracked: fileA and fileB.
> So, this searches fileA and fileB.  In particular: NO VERSION of fileC
> is searched.  fileC may be tracked/cached, but we don't search any
> version of that file, because this particular command line is about
> searching the working directory and fileC is not in the working
> directory.  To the best of my knowledge, git grep has always behaved
> that way.
>
> Users understand the idea of searching the working copy vs. the index
> vs. "old" (or different) versions of the repository.  They also
> understand that when searching the working copy, by default a subset
> of the files are searched.  Tell me: given all this information here,
> what possible explanation is there for SKIP_WORKTREE entries to be
> translated into searches of the cache when --cached is not specified?
> Please square that away with the fact that 'rm fileC' results in fileC
> NOT being searched.
>
> It's just completely, utterly wrong.

> Also, hopefully this helps answer your question about --untracked and
> skip_worktree.  --untracked is only useful when searching through the
> working tree, and is entirely about adding the "untracked" category to
> the things we search.  The skip_worktree bit is about adding more
> granularity to the "tracked" category.  The two are thus entirely
> orthogonal and --untracked shouldn't change behavior at all in the
> face of sparse checkouts.

> And I also think it explains more when the sparsity patterns and
> --ignore-sparsity-patterns flags even matter.  The division of working
> tree files which were tracked into two subsets (those that match
> sparsity patterns and those that don't) didn't matter because only one
> of those two sets existed and could be searched.  So the question is,
> when can the sparsity pattern divide a set of files into two subsets
> where both are non-empty?  And the answer is when --cached or REVISION
> is specified.