Re: Request: git add --interactive: split hunk: When can't split further, split on empty lines

[Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.org>]

Hi,  some minor comments.
On 30/05/2019 15:53, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> Hi James,
>
> On Wed, 29 May 2019, James Harvey wrote:
>
>> When adding interactively, 's' can be used to split the current hunk.
>> Once it gets down to where 's' reports "Sorry, cannot split this
>> hunk", it could be useful if it would then start splitting based on
>> empty lines, probably leaving empty lines at the top of the split
>> hunks.  It certainly wouldn't be perfect, and might create many hunks,
A binary search style split may be an option to avoid the 'many hunks' 
issue.
>> but it would be a nice alternative to manually editing the hunk.
>> Certainly someone could still manually edit the hunk if they didn't
>> want to use it in a particular situation.
> While a neat idea from the users' perspective, I think that it is
> technically a bit challenging, as you then have a problem to coalesce the
> patches appropriately.
>
> The thing with the splitting at context lines is that you have a much
> easier time to merge individual split-hunks into a "coalesced" hunk
> because the context lines stay context lines.
>
> Having said that, there was a patch series recently to add the ability to
> stage individual lines,
I believe that the git-gui (in tk/tcl, but using git commands) was 
already able to stage individual/selected lines, so there may be some 
ideas from there.

> and I think that your feature request could be
> implemented on top of that.
>
> In the meantime, an Outreachy intern and I worked on turning `git add -i`
> into a built-in (it was written in Perl, and the built-in is written in
> portable C instead), and I *think* that the plan with the patch series to
> stage individual lines was to re-implement it on top of the built-in patch
> series.
>
> Would you be interested in participating in that project?
>
> Ciao,
> Johannes
--
Philip