Re: jc/shortstatus

Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] writes:

A few points I haven't managed to think about, decide, nor test, are:

 - What should its exit code be?  Should it be consistent with the
   traditional "git status" at least when no paths are given, signallying
   failure when nothing is staged for committing, so that ancient out of
   tree scripts people may have written would not break too badly when we
   make the switch?

 - What should its default mode of output be?  Do people prefer "svn st"
   style short-format output, or should we stay verbose and explanatory?

 - Is it handling corner cases correctly?  e.g. Does it operate correctly
   when run from a subdirectory?  How should it handle submodules?  Before
   the initial commit?  Use of colors?

Just a quick status update, lest others waste too much time staring at the
series I posted last night.

 - Leading and trailing comments (e.g. "On branch foo", "Initial commit",
   "# No changes", ...) were missing.
 - Did not honor -v to show "diff --cached".
 - Subdirectory behaviour (status.relativepath configuration) was broken.

I have a version that fixes the above, and exits 0 when there is no error
(i.e. does not exit non-zero on clean index).  There are existing tests
that expect "git status" erroring out on clean index and there are some
that depends on "git status paths..." to show preview of a partial commit,
which needed to be replaced with "git commit --dry-run", but as far as I
can tell, I've took care of them all.

I am still feeling uneasy about the exit status change (the test scripts
are sources of how people who script around git take their inspirations
after all), but I'll send the result out for a review later without
changing that back to "exit failure when there is nothing to commit".