Linus Torvalds wrote:

The _original_ "git add" was literally just this one-liner:

        #!/bin/sh
        git-update-index --add -- "$@"

which actually was better in this respect (it updated the content), but 
that didn't do sub-directories, so this is arguable a bug introduced by 
commit 37539fbd: 

    [PATCH] Improved "git add"

    This fixes everybodys favourite complaint about "git add", namely that it
    doesn't take directories.

which started using 

        git-ls-files --others -z -- "$@"

together with the exclude files to generate the list of files to add. At 
that point, we lost files that already existed (since "--others" specifies 
just files we don't know about).

So should we use then

        git-ls-files --cached --others -z -- "$@"

in git-add?

I'm very much for having git-add, -rm, -mv and -resolved as porcelain
wrappers around git update-index, so there would be even less events
when you have to use this plumbish command directly.
-- 
Jakub Narebski
Warsaw, Poland
ShadeHawk on #git