Re: [PATCH] doc: 'T' status code for git status

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Dec 10, 2020, 00:47 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqlfe6zdts.fsf@gitster.c.googlers.com>
In-Reply-To: <X9FCUseRteZ1n7ec@coredump.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

Show 6 quoted lines

> TBH, I find the whole table overly confusing. But then, I am completely
> comfortable with the notion that it is really showing two diffs, with
> their results collated. To me it is simpler to just discuss the two
> sides of the diff independently, and then you do not even really need a
> table at all ("M" means modified no matter which column it appears in).
> But I may not be a representative Git user.

Me neither. I think the folks who originally wanted to see the table was curious about what combination of X and Y are possible.

For example, if a path is deleted in the index, there won't be any intelligent thing we can say about the path in the working tree, so after "git rm COPYING" we'd see "D COPYING", not "DD COPYING", and after "git rm --cached COPYING && date >COPYING", we'd still see "D COPYING", not "DM COPYING".

It is unclear how such knowledge would be useful to the readers, so I won't shed tears if we got rid of the table; the bits saved might be better used to enhance the description in the list of mnemonics.

Thanks.