Comment by Pyxl101 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Pyxl101 | Hacker News Reader

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> You seem to miss the point that instead of staging changes out of your working directory and then committing them, you could just commit those changes out of your working directory. The extra step of staging is not needed.

How would you describe this? One massive `git commit` with a ton of parameters? I don't see how it could work.

How would you describe "commit the first hunk of fileA (but not the second), and the second hunk of fileB (but not the first), and all of file C?". How do you "just commit those changes"? I believe you are missing how to actually describe this on the command line or with an API.

The index is absolutely needed. It's what allows you to build up a commit through a series of small, mutating commands like `git add fileC`, `git add -p fileA`. The value of the index is that you can build up your pending commit incrementally, while displaying what you've got with `git status`, then adding to it or removing from it.

What krupan and kazinator are saying is that you would use exactly the same command as today, i.e git add -p etc.

However, unlike today, those commands would automatically also do the equivalent of:

    if HEAD is marked as WIP
    then git commit --amend
    else git commit --special-wip-flag

As somebody who understands and uses the git index, I would wholly approve of this change.

Do you know how to use Git at all?

You can build a commit using multiple small "commit --amend --patch" commands. These use the index, but only in a fleeting, ephemeral way; changes go into the index and then immediately into a commit. They go into a new commit, or if you use --amend, into the existing top-most commit.

The index is a varnish onion.

Git has too many kinds of objects in its model which are all bags of files.

I do not require a staging area that is neither commit, nor tree.

Look at GIMP. In GIMP, some layer operations get staged: you get a temporary "floating layer". This gets commited with an "anchor" operation, IIRC. But it's the same kind of thing: a layer. It's not a "staging frame" or whatever, with its own toolbox menu of operations.

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