Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 0/2] make commit --verbose work with --no-status

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 05 Jun 2015 09:03:10 -0700

Tay Ray Chuan <[email-masked]> writes:

> Would it be a good idea to have a --diff-only option to include diff,
> but not status output? Or perhaps a --diff option, while leaving it to
> the user to specify if status output is to be included with
> --no-status, which would open the doors for mixing and matching status
> formatting control, eg. with --short.

The name "--diff-only" does not sound right, as people would wonder
what should happen when you give "--status --diff-only".

Perhaps you would need to do some careful thinking, similar to what
we did when deciding the "diff" and "log" options.

We originally had "--patch" and then "--patch-with-stat" to "diff"
and "log", but soon after that people found that "show only stat
without the patch text" is a useful thing to do.  We retrofitted the
command line parser to take "--patch" and "--stat" as orthogonal but
inter-related options, which was a successful conversion that did
not break backward compatibility (These days people would not even
know that these strangely combined forms "--patch-with-stat" and
"--patch-with-raw" even exist).

All of the above assumes that showing only the patch and not other
hints to help situation awareness while making a commit is a useful
thing in the first place.  I am undecided on that point myself.

Thanks.