Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] writes:
Quite honestly, a script that indiscriminately touches everybody
but only modifies a few is simply broken. Think about "make".
"git diff" reporting many cache-dirty files is simply reminding
you the brokenness of such a script.
I wouldn't call this "broken", but clearly suboptimal, yes. But for an
occasionnal one-liner (perl -pi -e ... or so), I lose less time
recompiling extra-files than I would writting a cleaner script. "make"
has no way to detect the absence of modification, while git has.
--
Matthieu