[recursive]

I was at least a little confused by stage for a while. I still think the distinction between stage and commit is unnecessary at best.

[tsm]

I had a recent epiphany about staging, which is that it really starts making sense if you stage as you go.

Let's say you want to write small feature X, and it truly makes sense for X to be a single commit. But doing X involves changing around both Y and Z. Git makes the following workflow easy:

* Fiddle around until you get Y working how you want it

* Stage it

* Fiddle around trying to get Z to work. Try something experimental. Nope, that's not you want it. `git checkout .` Try again.

You don't have to worry about only blasting away the failed Z attempt while preserving Y—since Y is staged, it's easy to keep around.

[komali2]

Technically the same metaphor can be used for "commit" if we assume you stage the one thing and commit that one thing. Now look through the same workflow again but replace "stage" with "stage it and commit it."

[agentgt]

You can also use shelve in mercurial. I have never needed to use it on git though because of staging/cheap branches.

[krupan]

But why stage when you can just commit? You can use rebase -i to modify that commit later if you need.

[minitech]

You might not want to commit all of your changes at once.

[krupan]

commit can be followed by a file name. Or there is commit --interactive or commit --patch to choose what to commit (or git add versions of those).

[nolemurs]

If you don't have `stage` how are you going to generate a commit which has only some of the changes you've done (potentially including partial commits from files)?

`stage` is unnecessary if you have a really simple workflow, but it provides a lot of flexibility at very little cognitive cost.

[recursive]

By specifying the parts you want to include when you commit. I think it's unnecessary for any reasonable work flow, and doesn't manage to break even on its benefit vs. cognitive cost.

[nolemurs]

So you want a long command line argument were you tag specific line numbers and have to get it all right at once? That sounds terrible to me.

Being able to add bits and pieces to your staging area and then once you've got it all ready commit is pretty useful.

I guess I just don't see the cognitive cost as being particularly high. It's a pretty simple model.

[recursive]

I really would prefer not to even use a CLI for this operation, since I think it's not well suited to the kind of interaction commits entail.

A "staging area" is a useful concept, but it's not one that needs to exist outside the UI of whatever tool you're using to generate the commit.

[krupan]

You can add bits and pieces to commits directly with commit --amend. The index is really not needed.

[lobster_johnson]

"git add -p" generally negates the need for incremental staging, unless you have made two unrelated changes to the same diff hunks that need to be untangled.