Re: amend warnings with no changes staged

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Aug 6, 2019, 02:47 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqtvavko1h.fsf@gitster-ct.c.googlers.com>
In-Reply-To: <20190806021618.GC61803@google.com>

Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:

Show 26 quoted lines

> Lukas Gross wrote:
>
>> I had intended to stage commits but forgot to do so. Git responded
>> with a normal commit creation message, so I pushed to the remote to
>> begin a CI build. When the build failed for the same reason, I
>> realized I had forgotten to stage the changes. An additional line in
>> the response to the effect of “Warning: did you mean to amend with no
>> changes?” would be very helpful to shorten this feedback loop.
>
> On second thought:
>
> 	$ git commit --amend --no-edit
> 	[detached HEAD 33a3db8805] Git 2.23-rc1
> 	 Author: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
> 	 Date: Fri Aug 2 13:12:24 2019 -0700
> 	 2 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
> 	$
>
> Some non-judgemental descriptive output like
>
> 	$ git commit --amend --no-edit
> 	No changes.
> 	$
>
> would address this case, without bothering people who are doing it
> intentionally.  So I think there's room for a simple improvement here.

I do that to refresh the committer timestamp. Do I now have to say something silly like

	$ GIT_EDITOR=true git commit --amend

to defeat the above (mis)feature, or is there a cleaner workaround?

Obviously I'd prefer to see a solution that does not force existing users to work around the new behaviour ;-)

> Care to take a stab at it?  builtin/commit.c would be the place to
> start.

I'd suggest not to start it before we know what we want. I am not yet convinced that "--amend --no-edit will become a no-op" is the final solution we want.