Re: Misleading documentation for git-diff-files (diff-filter)

From: John Cheng <johnlicheng@gmail.com>
Date: Jan 4, 2018, 15:53 UTC
Message-ID: <CAJzZBAQ_T3JDqsxy=s7gbrRQjDsdZODB8XsBb4TUCs1K1Bmnjw@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqvagifqj8.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>

To be clear, I don't mean to imply that diff-files should include files that are not the index. I was trying to say that as a user, the documentation gave me a different impression.

For background, my intent was to have a script to look for local git repos that with unstaged changes. After some trial and error, I found that git-ls-files gave me what I needed. However, I wanted to point out why I initially believed git-diff-files with show "added files". Think of this more as user feedback.

On Wed, Jan 3, 2018 at 3:53 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> John Cheng <johnlicheng@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> I wanted to know if git diff-files shows files that are not in the
>> index but are in the working tree.
>
> At least in the original design of Git, that would fundamentally be
> impossible, as Git _only_ cares about paths that are in the index,
> so a new file won't be in the picture until it is added.  Because a
> change is shown as "A"dded by the diff family of commands only when
> the old side lacks a path that appears in the new side, there is no
> way "diff-files" that compares the index and the working tree would
> see a path that is missing from the old (i.e. the index) side.

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John L Cheng