Re: [PATCH] Add --show-touched option to show "diff --git" line when contents are unchanged

From: Matthieu Moy <matthieu.moy@imag.fr>
Date: Aug 7, 2007, 06:47 UTC
Message-ID: <vpqfy2vu9gn.fsf@bauges.imag.fr>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.0.999.0708062118190.5037@woody.linux-foundation.org>

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> writes:

> It's not that the old output is "useful" in itself, but it's important for 
> people to know that the index is clean. So I'd suggest just setting a flag 
> when the header isn't printed, and then printing out a single line at the 
> end about "git index not up-to-date" or something.

Yes. Junio's patch has this as a comment, it's probably good to uncomment it, and perhaps print it directly on stdout so that you see it even with a pager.

> Doing a "git diff" cannot actually update the index (since it very much 
> has to work on a read-only setup too),

Err, what's the relationship between the two parts of your sentence? You can't be sure that git-diff will update the index (because you may be working on a read-only setup, yes), but git-diff can at least _try_ to, and fall-back to the read-only behavior if updating the index fails.

That's not a highly original idea since this is what git already does with "status".

Once more, I'm willing to write the code for that if it has a chance to be accepted.

-- 
Matthieu