Re: git status always modifies index?

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Nov 26, 2017, 03:32 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqwp2diuki.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <20171122220627.GE2854@sigill>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

> What I was trying to get at is that naming it "status --no-lock-index"
> would not be the same thing (even though with the current implementation
> it would behave the same). IOW, can we improve the documentation of
> "status" to point to make it easier to discover this use case.

Yeah, the name is unfortunate.

What the end user really wants to see, I suspect, is a "--read-only" option that applies to any filesystem entity and to any command, in the context of this thread, and also in the original discussion that led to the introduction of that option.

While I think the variable losing "index" from its name was a vast improvement relative to "--no-lock-index", simply because it expresses what we do a bit closer to "do not just do things without modifying anything my repository", it did not go far enough.