[leobakerhytch]

I fully agree that the default porcelain has poor UX for managing the staging area, but doesn’t a porcelain without it encourage overly large commits?

All sorts of workflows become substantially more difficult (if not impossible) with kitchen sink commits. Undoing a single-line change, for instance. I dislike large pull requests, let alone commits that introduce a half dozen different changes.

Sure, if you’re really disciplined you can produce small commits without staging, by committing as you go along, but you’re breaking flow every time you commit in this style.

I say all this because I would love a CLI that has half-way sane handling of (e.g.) restoring staged, deleted files; doesn’t conflate restoring files with switching branches; has consistency of flags between commands (such as commit vs stash message); etc., etc. I should try gitless ;)

[magicalhippo]

> porcelain without it encourage overly large commits?

Not for me. When using Mercurial back in the day I would manually split up commit, usually by copying over sets of files into a clean repo and committing there.

In Git tho the staging area is a lie. It encourages you commit half-truths. What I'd really want is to be able to enter a commit mode where the on-disk and staging area roles are flipped.

I want the stuff on disk to be what I commit, I want the "staging area" to be the changes that I've made that are not yet committed. This way I can pick a set of changes, compile, run tests and commit.

With Mercurial you could sorta do this with stashing I think, but I swore off it after losing changes a few times.

[couchand]

You can do the same with git stash, but it's also inadvisable because of how easy it is to lose changes. My workflow in this case is to checkout a new branch and commit the work-in-progress there, then switch back to the previous branch to check the commit. I've seen numerous pre-push scripts that do exactly that.

I wish git didn't use the disk at all! It gets in the way of parallelizing work. For instance, I'd love to be able to make a bunch of trial commits, then in parallel verify that none of them breaks the build. Or while a build/test loop is happening on one branch, switch to another to continue working.

[yencabulator]

> In Git tho the staging area is a lie. It encourages you commit half-truths. What I'd really want is to be able to enter a commit mode where the on-disk and staging area roles are flipped.

https://github.com/tv42/staged does something like that by writing the staged content to a temp dir.

(It has some smarts for Go GOPATH adjusting on top, but might not do things right with modules, at this time.)

[magicalhippo]

Thinking about it, I guess it should be possible to flip this around by using a temporary local branch. Commit everything there, then cherry-pick into repo dir and commit proper.

Once done delete temp branch and push.

[lmm]

> I fully agree that the default porcelain has poor UX for managing the staging area, but doesn’t a porcelain without it encourage overly large commits?

No, I'd say the opposite. The staging area encourages me to think that I can make my change and split it up into logical commits afterwards, even though I know I'll actually just give up and make it a big commit. When I didn't know about the staging area and just committed whenever I could, I produced better, smaller commits.

[lsaferite]

> The staging area encourages me to think that I can make my change and split it up into logical commits afterwards, even though I know I'll actually just give up and make it a big commit.

That sounds like a personal discipline problem and not a poor tool.

[lmm]

The whole point of a tool like git is so that I don't have to expend personal discipline.

[lsaferite]

That's like claiming a gun is just used for shooting other things and that the point of the gun is so you don't have to understand how to handle it. Then when you shoot yourself in the foot you get mad at the gun and not yourself.

[Qwertious]

Guns are expected to be drop-safe. Some people say "well you shouldn't be so careless with a lethal weapon anyway", and yet most people will want their gun to avoid firing a bullet when dropped.

[zepto]

Compare a Sig P226 to a Type 94 Nambu.

Both are guns. Neither will shoot you if you understand how to handle it. One is much easier to make mistakes with than the other.

The parent is saying that Git is the Nambu of DVCS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_94_Nambu_pistol#Unintenti...

[saurik]

That's how you get good commits... you do a bunch of changes to understand what you should have done and then you retell the story by carving it into commits. I have been doing this constantly for like a decade now and almost never "give up"... in contrast, Subversion, which doesn't have a staging area, is almost impossible to use as it requires you to somehow code in order the first time, which is ridiculous: no one is that perfect.