Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/2] Making "git commit" to mean "git commit -a".

From: Jakub Narebski <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 01 Dec 2006 01:06:28 +0100

Linus Torvalds wrote:

> At least for me, it turns out that the only mode I _never_ use personally 
> is the "git commit -i" thing, which was actually the original behaviour, 
> and which you'd think that I would encourage for that reason. But no. Of 
> all the modes of "git commit", that's the one I think is the least 
> important, and least interesting.
> 
> Of course, during a merge, you do need "-i" if you list files, but I think 
> "-a" subsumes almost all cases (you _can_ use "-i file-list" or totally 
> manually decide to have some extra edits you did that you don't want to 
> commit together with the merge, but that's such a special case that I 
> doubt anybody does it, so I don't think it's a big deal).
> 
> Anyway, we have "-i", and we don't force anybody to use it, so the fact 
> that it's a bit odd and not that useful doesn't really matter. It 
> certainly "fits" in the git commit family as another case, it's just not 
> one of the important cases.

So, in short, -i is easier to explain, but is also least used. Perhaps
also because one can simply update index with <files> before git commit
instead of doing "git commit -i <files>".
-- 
Jakub Narebski
Warsaw, Poland
ShadeHawk on #git