Re: [PATCH 6/7] stage: add 'diff' subcommand

[Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>]

Junio C Hamano wrote:
> A more notable aspect of the above list is not the similarity but
> difference from the rest of Git.  The above organizes various
> operations on the staging area in a single command as its operating
> modes, so you'd use "git stage --diff" for comparing with the
> staging area but use something else ("git commit --diff HEAD"???).

It is not different from the rest of git:

 * git branch --delete
 * git tag --delete
 * git remote remove
 * git stash drop
 * git worktree remove
 * git submodule add
 * git config --edit
 * git notes remove
 * git bundle create
 * git bisect start

Plus it's not unusual for commands and options to be redundant,
especially when they attempt to simplify or improve the user interface,
starting with `git checkout` / `git switch`.

> It is a good example that illustrates that the proposed organization
> may not help learning or using the system for operations that also
> apply to other things like commit and working tree (in other words,
> "git stage --grep" may not be such a good idea for the same reason
> as "git stage --diff").  But if it were limited to operations that
> apply only to the index (e.g. "git add" and "git rm"), it may be an
> improvement (I think we added "git stage" synonym exactly for that
> reason, already).
> 
> Having said that, if we added "git stage --remove", there may be
> complaints that say "the stage command does too many things",

Or there might not.

> just like those that caused "checkout" to be split into "restore"
> (check out contents for selected paths in order to work on the current
> branch) and "switch" (check out a branch in order to start working on
> it).  I dunno.

I don't see many people complaining that `git branch` does "too many
things", neither `git stash` or any of the commands listed above.

Moreover, you are not addressing the most interesting thing my proposal
enables:

  git stage --edit

-- 
Felipe Contreras