Re: Can't git stash after using git add -N

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Mar 16, 2016, 21:11 UTC
Message-ID: <CAPc5daVnQ94jc8pP=-FUgRA7oS=vXNGG=5Z23NWuZZScnhkQ9g@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20160316210535.GA2200@sigill.intra.peff.net>

I actually think "silently ignore intent-to-add" was a mistake. We used to error out at write-tree time, which I think is the right behaviour--"I know I want to have this path, but I cannot yet decide with what content" is what the user is telling us when she says "add -N", so until that indecision is resolved, we shouldn't write out a tree object out of the index.

On Wed, Mar 16, 2016 at 2:05 PM, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:

Show 39 quoted lines

> On Wed, Mar 16, 2016 at 05:02:45AM -0700, Josh Triplett wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Mar 15, 2016 at 09:51:35PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>> > Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org> writes:
>> >
>> > > As far as I can tell, if I run "git add -N" on a file, and then commit
>> > > without adding the file contents, it gets committed as an empty file.
>> >
>> > Is that true?  Git once worked like that in earlier days, but I
>> > think write-tree (hence commit) would simply ignore intent-to-add
>> > entries from its resulting tree.
>>
>> Git 2.7.0 does appear to commit an empty file if I commit after git add
>> -N.
>
> I don't think this is the case:
>
>   git init
>   echo content >file
>   git add -N file
>   git commit -m "empty?"
>
>   git ls-tree HEAD
>   git status
>
> shows that we committed an empty tree. So I see two obvious
> possibilities for improvement:
>
>   1. This commit should have failed without --allow-if-empty. We need to
>      be more careful about intent-to-add entries when figuring out if
>      the commit would be empty or not
>
>   2. I'm not sure if "silently ignore intent-to-add" is the best policy.
>      At least a warning ("hey, what did you want to do with these
>      entries") seems merited, if not aborting the commit entirely. I
>      hesitate on the latter only because perhaps that would mess up
>      somebody's legitimate workflow.
>
> -Peff