Re: [PATCH] git-diff: Add --staged as a synonym for --cached.

On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 11:29:35AM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

I think you guys are barking up a wrong tree.

The staged state, the work tree state and the committed states are three
conceptually different things.  Making them stand out as distinct entities
at the UI level is a _good thing_.

I'm not sure I agree. They _are_ different things, but in the case of
diff, you are really treating each of them like a tree (which makes
range operators a little silly, but then that is a silliness already
present in "git diff tree1..tree2").

But again, I would not be convinced this is a good direction until I
saw:

 - the actual design, especially to what degree any ugliness is exposed
   when we realize that they _aren't_ trees. IOW, how badly does this
   abstraction leak?

 - numbers showing that it isn't going to perform significantly worse

And I'm still not volunteering to work on it, so somebody else will have
to come up with those things. ;)

-Peff