Originally, "git add -N" was introduced to help users from forgetting to
add new files to the index before they ran "git commit -a". As an attempt
to help them further so that they do not forget to say "-a", "git commit"
to commit the index as-is was taught to error out, reminding the user that
they may have forgotten to add the final contents of the paths before
running the command.
This turned out to be a false "safety" that is useless. If the user made
changes to already tracked paths and paths added with "git add -N", and
then ran "git add" to register the final contents of the paths added with
"git add -N", "git commit" will happily create a commit out of the index,
without including the local changes made to the already tracked paths. It
was not a useful "safety" measure to prevent "forgetful" mistakes from
happening.
It turns out that this behaviour is not just a useless false "safety", but
actively hurts use cases of "git add -N" that were discovered later and
have become popular, namely, to tell Git to be aware of these paths added
by "git add -N", so that commands like "git status" and "git diff" would
include them in their output, even though the user is not interested in
including them in the next commit they are going to make.
Fix this ancient UI mistake, and instead make a commit from the index
ignoring the paths added by "git add -N" without adding real contents.
Based on the work by Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy, and helped by injection of
sanity from Jonathan Nieder and others on the Git mailing list.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Add commit message to avoid commit's aborting due to the lack of
commit message, not because there are INTENT_TO_ADD entries in index.
Signed-off-by: Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Writing a tree out of an index with an "intent to add" entry is blocked.
This implies that you cannot "git commit" from such a state; however you
can still do "git commit -a" or "git commit $that_path".
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
This adds "--intent-to-add" option to "git add". This is to let the
system know that you will tell it the final contents to be staged later,
iow, just be aware of the presense of the path with the type of the blob
for now. It is implemented by staging an empty blob as the content.
With this sequence:
$ git reset --hard
$ edit newfile
$ git add -N newfile
$ edit newfile oldfile
$ git diff
the diff will show all changes relative to the current commit. Then you
can do:
$ git commit -a ;# commit everything
or
$ git commit oldfile ;# only oldfile, newfile not yet added
to pretend you are working with an index-free system like CVS.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
