Re: [PATCH] Change all git-status output to be "comments"

"Shawn O. Pearce" [off-list ref] writes:

You wouldn't believe how many of my merge commits end with
the following message from git-status:

  "nothing to commit (working directory clean)"

This happens because of the way I sometimes create (and resolve)
some types of merges.  My commit message buffer gets prepped with
the output of git-status, which has this nice message way down at the
bottom of the file, below a large-ish block of lines that start with
"#".  Since git-commit strips those lines, I always fail to see the
trailing line that doesn't start with "#" and consequently fail to
see that "nothing to commit ..." will be part of my merge message.

So always comment out the output of git-status.

I think a better change would be to remove the 'nothing to
commit' when recording a merge.  The tool strongly discourage
creating an empty commit (iow, "diff-tree it^ it" is empty) for
a single parent case, while a merge that ends up (even when you
did not use "ours" strategy but resolved "fixing the same bug,
but differently" conflicts by hand) nullifying everything the
other side did is a perfectly normal merge.

I do not have a strong feeling against saying '# ' in front of
'nothing to commit' in the non-merge cases, other than that the
current one makes the 'nothing to commit' message itself stand
out in 'git status' output.  There also is a small issue of
updating the documentation and retraining people.  We need to
grep and replace them in the documentation and tutorial, and
start telling people who learn older copies of documentation
google finds that the older git said things slightly
differently.