Comments on "status -v" (was: Two crazy proposals for changing git's diff commands)

On Fri, 10 Feb 2006 01:05:28 -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> 
> Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> writes:
> 
> > Under that logic, "git status -v" would show all the diffs (not just 
> > filenames) and "git commit -v .." would be the same as "git commit .." but 
> > the "-v" flag would have been passed down to the "git status" call, so the 
> > commit message file would be pre-populated with the diff.
> 
> Now that is done and sitting at the tip of "next".

Thanks. This does look quite useful.

A couple of comments, though:

1) I think the patch should come after the traditional status summary,
   not before. If something is obviously "wrong" (non-updated file,
   etc.) that will be more obvious in the summary, so it's good to
   present that up front, and not bury it after the patch, (which
   might make it initially invisible without scrolling).

2) Using the "^---$" separator to separate the the edited contents
   into a commit message and ignored content seems risky to me.

   One risk is that the user might put that magic string in the commit
   message. Perhaps the risk is low, but it would be a silent
   destruction of historical data, which seems like a bad trap.

   A second risk is that with the current patch-then-summary order it
   is actually quite easy to inadvertently clobber the separator while
   editing the commit message. Particularly because the separator is
   placed exactly where the user must begin editing. So it would be
   easy to leave the separator trailing on a line of
   commit message comments or else introducing some initial
   whitespace that would break it.

   Moving the patch after the summary (as discussed above) would help
   greatly in avoiding the clobbered separator, but wouldn't address
   the separator-appears-in-commit-message problem.

-Carl

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