Torsten Bögershausen <tbo...@web.de> writes: >> $ git rm -r --cached . && git add . > > (Both should work) > > To be honest, from the documentation, I can't figure out the difference > between > $ git read-tree --empty > and > $ git rm -r --cached . > > Does anybody remember the discussion, why we ended up with read-tree ?
We used to use neither, and considered it fine to "rm .git/index" if you wanted to empty the on-disk index file in the old world. In the modern world, folks want you to avoid touching filesystem directly and instead want you to use Git tools, and the above are two obvious ways to do so. "git read-tree" (without any parameter, i.e. "read these 0 trees and populate the index with it") and its modern and preferred synonym "git read-tree --empty" (i.e. "I am giving 0 trees and I know the sole effect of this command is to empty the index.") are more direct ways to express "I want the index emptied" between the two. The other one, "git rm -r --cached .", in the end gives you the same state because it tells Git to "iterate over all the entries in the index, find the ones that match pathspec '.', and remove them from the index.". It is not wrong per-se, but conceptually it is a bit roundabout way to say that "I want the index emptied", I would think. I wouldn't be surprised if the "rm -r --cached ." were a lot slower, due to the overhead of having to do the pathspec filtering that ends up to be a no-op, but there shouldn't be a difference in the end result.
