Re: unmerged files listed in the beginning of git-status

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

bill lam <cbill.lam@gmail.com> writes:

> I noticed in the new git 1.6.4.2 .

I hope you didn't.  This is only in 'master' and will appear first in the
upcoming 1.6.5; it is never meant for 1.6.4.X maintenance series and
1.6.4.2 does not have this change.

> git-status show unmerged files
> with a clause of explanation.  This is very helpful. However these
> unmerged files are listed in the beginning and followed by modified
> files,

"git status" is preview of what git commit does.  The "Changes to be
committed" section is given at the beginning of the output because it is
the most important one.  But while reviewing the conflicts, you would want
to notice conflicted paths more than what are already resolved and staged.

It used to be that unmerged paths were mixed together with locally
modified paths in the "Changed but not updated" list, after the "Changes
to be committed" list.  This made the unmerged paths harder to spot than
necessary.

To remedy this, unmerged ones are now:

 (1) placed in a new, separate section that appears only when there are
     unmerged paths, to make the fact that there is something unusual
     going on (i.e. conflicts) stand out; and

 (2) the new section is given at the top of the status output to give
     these unmerged paths more prominence.

Having said all that, the relative importance of the pieces of information
given in "git status" output is fairly subjective.

If you are a confident, know-what-I-am-doing type, you would see the
"Changes to be committed" list the most important, because that is where
you make sure you have added all the changes you want to include in the
commit.  If you are a forgetful type, on the other hand, you would see
"Changed but not updated" and "Untracked files" more important, because
that is where you make sure there isn't any files you modified and new
files you created that you want to include in the commit but may have
forgotten.  If you are into flipping many branches and often commit your
changes on a wrong branch, you may value the "On branch foo" information
at the top the most.  So in that sense, there cannot be a single right
order of these sections.

But unmerged entries are something you need to deal with _first_ before
being able to go further, so in that sense it is more important than
anything else in the traditional output.

In the output, "the most important part first" rule is unlikely to change,
if only because this is what you are shown when committing in the editor,
and even in 1.7.0 when "git status" stops being "git commit --dry-run"
because we would still keep consistency of the two outputs,

By the way, please do not deflect responses to your message away from
yourself using Mail-Followup-To.