Vim & Vision

Git's Index Permalink

Git Added about a month ago

Plasmasturm has some excellent things to say about git's index, including:

So what is the index good for? The key to understanding it is how it interacts with git diff. Once you add something to the index (also referred to as staging it), it disappears off the diff. You can pass --cached to see what changes you have staged, but by default, it doesn’t show you the changes that you have asserted are ready for commit. When I first read about this, it sounded outright stupid to me. Why would anyone want that? Turns out: because it is hugely helpful. Consider: when a merge fails, the successfully merged diff hunks are staged, but conflicted hunks are not – which means that git diff will show only conflicts, and the successfully performed part of the merge doesn’t cloud the diff. Furthermore, the way to mark files with conflicts as merged is to stage them after manual resolution, which makes them too disappear from the diff. Maybe this is why Linus introduced the concept in the first place, being that the main part of his job is to perform merges all day long. But that’s far from the only circumstance in which the index has been useful to me.

Colophon

Django Python 960.gs Git Vim NetBSD Nginx

The Author

The author is a software engineer living in Australia. He sux at guitar, loves camping, doesn't like cake, does like coffee and is a lazy home brewer.

Links

ChoppingBoard, Project365, RageQuit

Vim & Vision

Git's Index Permalink

Colophon

The Author

Meta

Recent Entries

Links

♥ Actors/Artists/Characters