Re: BUG in git diff-index

On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 10:12:07AM -0400, Andy Lowry wrote:

What I'm actually after is a tree-to-filesystem comparison, regardless
of index. I've currently got a "diff" thrown in as a "work-around"
before "diff-index", but  now I understand it's not a workaround at
all. If there's a better way to achieve what I'm after, I'd appreciate
a tip. Otherwise I'll just change the comments explaining why there's
a "diff" in my script.

If your workaround is just to refresh the index, then you can do "git
update-index --refresh", rather than diff.

I don't think there is a plumbing command to do a direct
filesystem-to-tree comparison without having an index at all. "git diff
<treeish>" claims in the documentation to do so, but besides not being
plumbing, I think it is really just doing the same thing as diff-index,
under the hood. The index is a pretty fundamental part of git's view of
the working tree.

-Peff