Re: Commiting automatically (2)

Maaartin [off-list ref] writes:

However, when I use my git-autocom script, those files get marked as deleted. 
This is quite strange, especially because of them still existing. I'd strongly 
prefer git-autocom to behave just like git commit (i.e., tracking the files).

The relevant part of my script follows:

export GIT_INDEX_FILE=.git/autocom.tmp
git add -A &&

If you really want "just like commit", then it would be more like "make a
commit object out of the current index, and put that somewhere outside the
current branch", and will not involve any "git add", no?

A useful goal would be "as if I said 'git add -u && git commit' from the
current state" (alternatively, you could say s/-u/-A/).

If this autocom.tmp starts out empty, "add" will of course honor what you
wrote in .gitignore hence would not add ignored files.  You may have '*.o'
in the ignore mechanism to exclude usual build products.  Until you
somehow tell git that you care about a vendor-supplied binary blob file
"binblob1.o" even though it has a name for usual ignored ones, you don't
want to get it tracked, and once you have done so with "git add -f", you
do want to get it tracked from that point.  But your script cannot be
clever enough to selectively say "add -f" for such a file.

The "from the current state" part of the sentence of your goal (clarified
by the second paragraph above) fundamentally means you need to start from
your real index, so "cp -p .git/index $TMP_INDEX" is both appropriate and
inevitable for your script.