One thing that I think is non-intuitive to a lot of users (either novice 
or who just don't do it much) is that it matters where in the process you 
do "git add <path>" if you're also changing the file. Even if you 
understand the index, you may not realize (or may not have internalized 
the fact) that what git-add does is update the index with what's there 
now.

I think the more obvious behavior is to have it record the fact that you 
want to have the path tracked, but require one of the usual updating 
mechanisms to get a particular content into the index.

This should be pretty simple to implement: use --cacheinfo 0 0 $path 
instead of --add -- $path, and teach programs that look at the objects 
recorded in the index (rather than just hashes or other info) about all-0 
hashes meaning "but no content there". write-tree would probably just 
skip the entry (and then you could add a file, but still produce commits 
without it until you actually do either an update-index explicitly or one 
of the commit option sets that updates it); diff would treat it as empty; 
checkout would ignore it.

	-Daniel
*This .sig left intentionally blank*
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html