3 ms·

I think he is arguing that you should work on one feature at a time.

• ajross 9y ago
  And I was saying that as a practical matter, you don't always get that option. Individual developers working on their own code don't need the index. But then quite frankly they don't need much more than RCS either (does anyone remember RCS? Pretend I said subversion if you don't). Situations like integrating a big blob of messy changes happen all the time in real software engineering, and that's the use case for the git index.
  • chris_wot 9y ago
    Is it really that many developers who don't split up their code into seperate commits?
  • kazinator 9y ago
    I split work consisting of multiple changes in the same file just fine under CVS and Quilt. I would convert the change to a unified diff, remove the change, and then apply the selected hunks out of that diff with patch. ("Selected" means making a copy of the diff, in which I take out the hunks I don't want to apply. Often I'd just have it loaded in Vim, and use undo to roll back to the original diff and remove something else.) Using reversed diffs (diff -uR) I used also to selectively remove unwanted changes, similarly to "git checkout --patch" This is basically what git is doing; it doesn't require the index. The index is just the destination where these selective hunks are being applied.