On 11/9/25 6:34 PM, D. Ben Knoble wrote:

On Sun, Nov 9, 2025 at 11:43 AM René Scharfe [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

This actually fixes the error code when using the options --cached,
--find-copies-harder, --no-ext-diff and --quiet together:
run_diff_index() indirectly calls diff-lib.c::show_modified(), which
queues even non-modified entries using diff_change() because we need
them for copy detection.  diff_change() sets flags.has_changes, though,
which causes diff_can_quit_early() to declare we're done after seeing
only the very first entry -- way too soon.

This does describe the behavior I saw, but it seems to me that, if we
have changes, then we ought to be able to quit early for --quiet, no?

So there's some other knock-on effect that causes quitting early to be
wrong here, and I'm not exactly sure what it is (other than the diff
queues being different sizes when we hit relevant parts of
diffcore_std, though it's the working case that has the larger queue).
So I'm having a hard time tying this paragraph to the actual issue
(mostly due to my complete unfamiliarity with the diffing subsystem).

run_diff_index() calls diff-lib.c::diff_cache() to queue up index
entries.  As mentioned above it only queues up the very first one, no
matter if it's a change or not.  In Git's repo this would be
.cirrus.yml.  That's not the end of it, yet, though.  It then calls
diffcore_std(), which calls diffcore_rename() to remove non-changes
from the queue and overwrites flags.has_changes based on whether the
queue is empty now.

René