Junio C Hamano <gits...@pobox.com> writes:
> In other words, you give paths from the command line to tell the
> command that you want to record the contents of them in the working
> tree as a whole to be recorded in the resulting commit.
... and --only/--include only makes difference wrt what happens to
contents from the other paths.
Perhaps the attached would clarify it better, but there may have to
be some tutorial material to teach users that fundamentally there
are two ways to use Git, one to prepare what to be committed in the
index and run "git commit" without any paths, and the other to
pretty much ignore the index and run "git commit" with paths (or
with "-a"), and mixing two are considered to be rare exception.
You would (1) work with an elaborate sequence to build the next
commit in the index using "add path" and "add -p", (2) notice a
change that can go before what you are building (e.g. trivial
typofix) outside the paths you are touching, and (3) edit that path
and do "git commit <path>". That is the only scenario that makes
some sense to mix the two modes.
Imagine the change (2) you want to jump over your changes in (1)
happens to be in a path you are working with the index, e.g. after
running:
git add -p hello.rb
and picking only parts of changes you made to hello.rb into the
index, you found a trivial typo in the same file but in an unrelated
place (i.e. "git diff hello.rb" at that point would not show the
typo either in the preimage or the context). There is no way to
make the typofix first without disrupting what you did so far, and
"git commit -o" would not help (you would instead do a "git stash"
to save away the work in progress, make _only_ the typofix in the
same file, commit and then unstash, or something).
So in short, stick to either work with the index or ignore the
index; do not mix the two workflows and you would not have to worry
about "-o" or "-i".
Documentation/git-commit.txt | 2 +-
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
diff --git a/Documentation/git-commit.txt b/Documentation/git-commit.txt
index 0bbc8f5..d6c4af1 100644
--- a/Documentation/git-commit.txt
+++ b/Documentation/git-commit.txt
@@ -250,7 +250,7 @@ FROM UPSTREAM REBASE" section in linkgit:git-rebase[1].)
-o::
--only::
- Make a commit only from the paths specified on the
+ Make a commit only from the working tree contents of the paths
specified on the
command line, disregarding any contents that have been
staged so far. This is the default mode of operation of
'git commit' if any paths are given on the command line,
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