On Thu, May 16, 2019 at 7:12 PM Philip Oakley <philipoak...@iee.org> wrote: > Maybe we need a `git index` command to make it far more visible to > average users (or `git staging-area --show`, with a --cached option ;-).
Not commenting on the other parts (and also Junio's mail) since I still need more time to process. But how about we see the index as a "commit-in-progress" (or "staging area" which is almost the same, maybe "commit area" is better)? You can't make a commit visible unless you check it out (and then can use various tools available to work on filesystem), or you use git diff/show to examine it. The index is treated pretty much the same way, except that it does not have a proper SHA-1 yet because it's still a work in progress. Short of creating a fuse filesystem to show you the index content (as read-only files) I don't see any better way that you can actually see the index without checking it out. PS. Yes I ignored the role of the index during a merge conflict. Not relying on the index for conflict handling might be possible, but I'm not going to touch that topic, way out of my area. -- Duy
