Re: [PATCH] add a diff-files command

From: Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org>
Date: Apr 28, 2005, 16:56 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.62.0504281238130.14033@localhost.localdomain>
In-Reply-To: <7vr7gu97xq.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

On Thu, 28 Apr 2005, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> If you want to see if working tree has some junk other than
> those listed in dontdiff, wouldn't this be sufficient?
> 
>   $ show-files --others | grep -f dontdiff

Well, it would work if the dontdiff file other people are maintaining was made up of regexps. But it is made of shell wildcard patterns meant to be used with the -X switch of the diff command.

> Again, "checking for potentially uncommitted" files is what
> you use show-files --others for, not show-diff.

Indeed. And yesterday I realized that the (currently unimplemented) --ignore switch to show-files, combined with the exclusion pattern list, whould be more logical than teaching show-diff (which I still think is a misnamer in the context of the other diff tools) about files unknown to the cache. The patch to show-files is also much smaller and logical.

BTW, I don't do this out of pure entousiasm but rather trying to make my own workflow with the Linux kernel source tree more efficient in the context of git usage. My pure coding entousiasm lies somewhere else.

Nicolas