Re: partial commit of file-to-directory change, was Re: Bugreport

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

We had a related discussion on "commit -i/-o tests" review thread, where we noticed that "git commit -i foobar", when "foobar" does not match any path in the index, silently ignore that unmatching pathspec (but "commit -o foobar" does error out, saying "did not match any file(s) known to git"). The important design decision we made long time ago when we introduced partial commit ("commit -o pathspec") is that we do not _add_ paths (that match the pathspec) that are not tracked. We require explicit "git add" for them before you run "git commit".

So, I suspect that list_paths() that gives "d" as a thing to add is broken. "commit -m + ." at that point is saying "we should get the latest contents from the working tree for all the paths in the real index, add[*] them to the temporary index freshly read from HEAD, and the resulting temporary index should be written out as a tree" to create a commit, and then "the same set of contents for the paths then should be added to the real index, so that the differences between the tree we wrote out of the temporary index to update the HEAD and the real index would still be the changes already in the index before this partial commit".

    Side note: here, "add" would include removing (if the working
    tree file for the path is gone) or killing 'd' while adding
    'd/b.txt'.

So I would understand if 'd/b.txt' is listed (because in the real index there already is d/b.txt known), but if the directory 'd' itself is listed, that does sound like a bug.