diff-index --cached on bare repository

diff-index --cached on bare repository

[Johannes Gilger]

Hi list,

today I stumbled over the output of "git diff-index --cached HEAD" in a 
bare repository. While diff-index HEAD just reminds me that I got to 
have a work-tree, --cached outputs all the files in HEAD as deleted. The 
question is if this is intended behaviour? Or is it irrelevant because 
diff-index is only plumbing? I found a mail of the gitk-team working 
around this, which is funny because I discovered this while working on 
GitX.

So please, enlighten me ;)

Greetings,
Jojo

-- 
Johannes Gilger <heipei@hackvalue.de>
http://hackvalue.de/heipei/
GPG-Key: 0x42F6DE81
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Re: diff-index --cached on bare repository

[Jeff King]

On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 04:13:53PM +0000, Johannes Gilger wrote:

> today I stumbled over the output of "git diff-index --cached HEAD" in a 
> bare repository. While diff-index HEAD just reminds me that I got to 
> have a work-tree, --cached outputs all the files in HEAD as deleted. The 
> question is if this is intended behaviour? Or is it irrelevant because 
> diff-index is only plumbing? I found a mail of the gitk-team working 
> around this, which is funny because I discovered this while working on 
> GitX.

Generally commands which don't make sense in a bare repository are
forbidden. But diff-index _can_ work in a bare repository, since there
is no reason you can't do index-only operations. However, a bare repo
has no index by default, in which case diff-index shows the results you
saw.

So no, it's not a bug, but it is potentially confusing. I think nobody
ever worried about it because diff-index is plumbing, so users are
unlikely to stumble into it.

-Peff