Re: [FAQ?] Rationale for git's way to manage the index

[Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>]

Hi,

On Tue, 8 May 2007, Martin Langhoff wrote:

> Heh. Making the index very visible makes sense when you are merging,

You're saying that the main use of the index is to help merging. I have to 
disagree strongly.

When I have been chasing a bug all over the place, and finally found it, 
my working tree is a mess. Lots of assertions, lots of debugging 
statements, some of them commented out. So, now it is cleanup time, right?

The problem is that more often than not, I broke my fix while cleaning up.

Therefore, I now put all changed files into the index (git add -u), and 
clean up the files one by one, always checking with "git diff" and "git 
diff HEAD" what I still have to do.

Yes, very often I can just take the original version of a file (git reset 
--soft <file...> would be handy here), but it helped me quite a number of 
times to have my messed-up-but-working state in the index.

In a sense, I am using the index as the stash commit we talked about every 
once in a while.

Ciao,
Dscho