Re: Call Me Gitless

Daniel Barkalow [off-list ref] writes:

On Mon, 18 Aug 2008, Junio C Hamano wrote:
...

quoted

    If we had a configuration for "index-free" people, that changes the
    semantics of "git add" to register object name of an empty blob when a
    new path is added, makes "git add" for existing blobs a no-op, but
    keeps "git commit -a" and "git commit <paths>" to operate as they
    currently do, then people with such configuration could:

	$ >new-file
        $ git add new-file
        $ edit old-file
        $ edit new-file
        $ git diff

    to always see what's the difference from the HEAD is with "git diff",
    and any of these three:

	$ git commit -a
        $ git commit old-file
        $ git commit old-file new-file

    would work as expected by them.  We still need to support the three
    diff variants for normal git people, but people who do not use index
    do not have to know the two variants ("git diff" vs "git diff HEAD");
    such a change could be argued as a "UI improvement" [*1*].

I think that having the possibility of adding an empty blob (or maybe a 
magical "nothing currently here but git-ls-files includes it") would be 
preferrable to a no-index mode.

I am not sure if you are really saying something different from what I am
saying.  We'll see after this three patch series.  The first one is an
unrelated bugfix (but the bug won't trigger with existing callers -- only
triggered with the added codepath).