Re: Bug in "git diff --quiet" handling.

Paul Gortmaker [off-list ref] writes:

I'm assuming this is a bug,...

Yeah, it sounds like you found an interesting one.

As far as I know, whatever "format-patch" does in response to "--quiet"
option is not a deliberate and designed behaviour, as squelching the patch
output in the context of the command does not make much sense [*1*]; the
current implementation simply writes anything off as an user error when
"format-patch --quiet" did anything "interesting" ;-).

A patch to make --quiet not to squelch the patch output, and instead
silence any progress output would be a good addition.

Thanks.

[Footnote]

*1* Also note that at least in the original design, the standard output
from "format-patch" was never meant to be squelched.  It was the only way
the calling scripts (and humans) can learn under what filenames the
patches were output, so that the command line to fire them off as e-mails
can be programatically formed without running "ls" and filtering non-patch
files manually (if you use "format-patch -o newdir" and newdir did not
have anythning in it before running the command, of course you can rely on
the output from "ls").