Re: [PATCH 0/2] Making "git commit" to mean "git commit -a".

Jakub Narebski [off-list ref] wrote:

Robert Shearman wrote:

quoted

Having the index exposed for even simple operations means that the user 
has to initially learn three states instead of two. The worst thing 
about the index is that it is a limbo state. The committed content is in 
the history and can be viewed by gitk (and other tools that the user 
will be introduced to later) and the working tree is exactly what the 
user sees in their editor. Having a hidden state isn't very good from an 
HCI point of view.

Index is accessible, just like committed contents. The fact that gitk, qgit,
git-gui doesn't display state of index is their limitation.

Actually git-gui shows the index, but not quite as well as diff
and friends would.

But based on this thread I had a major realization: git-gui is
totally wrong in how it displays files (and therefore gitool is
too!).  I'm going to rewrite that part of git-gui's UI, hopefully
early next week.

Linus is right: To deny the index is to deny git itself.  Trying to
hide part of the index in git-gui is just wrong and makes things
like merge conflict resolutions harder, not easier.

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