Re: [PATCH] Add --show-touched option to show "diff --git" line when contents are unchanged

Matthieu Moy [off-list ref] writes:

Matthieu Moy [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

"git-status $args" on the other hand is a preview of "what would
happen if I say 'git-commit $args'", and in order to compute
that, you would fundamentally need to be able to write into the
object store.  In a special case of giving empty $args it can be
read-only.

Can you give an example where it _could_ not be read-only?

Think of what "git commit -a" would have to do.  It needs to
hash and deposit a new object for blobs that have been
modified.  Where do those new blob object go?

In the same way, I expect git-status to be read-only for the user. You
say "what _would_ happen _if_ I say commit $args". But you don't
commit, the sentence is conditionnal. I don't expect any tool to have
visible side-effects when I say "what would happen if ...".

By running git-status the user is asking to get the overall
picture, discarding the "touched but not modified" information.
Once you _HAVE TO_ refresh the index for whatever reason, it is
better to keep the result of the effort and cycles spent for
that refresh operation for obvious performance reasons in
practice, and that is what we have now in git-status.  IOW, we
are practical bunch.

Maybe in a theoretical ideal world, you might prefer to
reverting back to the stat-dirty original index to make
git-status appear a read-only operation, with continued degraded
performance.  You are welcome to reimplement it that way, and
the patch should be trivial (while git-commit.sh is still a
script, at least) but that is not what we did.