Re: git-diff on touched files: bug or feature?

Johannes Schindelin [off-list ref] writes:

Okay, I'll answer just this one, instead of pointing you to the thread 
that I've been pointing to twice now

The link was probably not the right one since I saw only two [PATCH]
message, but yes, I remember a thread pointing out why git-status had
to update the index. I'm not arguing against that, I'm happy with the
current git-status behavior, but I find the git-diff one inconsistant
with git-status, and still don't understand any reason why a normal
user would want a difference.

When is the time to say "git status"?

It is just before committing.  I.e when you really think that you're done 
editing, and want to have the end picture.  "git status" only gives you 
names, and therefore it _has_ to update the index if it got out of sync, 
to show meaningful results.

When is the time to say "git diff"?

Much more often.  In the middle of your work.  And there it would be 
_disruptive_ if it updated the index all the time, especially if you have 
a quite large working tree.

That's your point of view, but I do not share it. Depending on the
kind of things I'm doing, I usually run status regularly, because it's
short to read, and it shows me both staged and unstaged changes.
git-status tells me if I did something obviously totally wrong
(changing a file on which I was not working, deleting something
important ...), and after that, git-diff gives me a finer-grained
vision of what I did.

Does this really sound so much irreasonable to you?

-- 
Matthieu

On Thu, Aug 02, 2007 at 05:45:20PM +0200, Matthieu Moy wrote:

Depending on the kind of things I'm doing, I usually run status
regularly, because it's short to read, and it shows me both staged and
unstaged changes.  git-status tells me if I did something obviously
totally wrong (changing a file on which I was not working, deleting
something important ...), and after that, git-diff gives me a
finer-grained vision of what I did.

Yeah, ditto for me.  When I return to a project after having been away a
few minutes, the first things I do are

	git branch	# remind me which topic I was working on
	git status	# remind me if I was in the middle of something.

So I end up running it a lot.  I only do a git-diff if I need some
details.

--b.