Re: git status --porcelain is a mess that needs fixing

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 01:12:24AM -0500, Jonathan Nieder wrote:

> Jeff King wrote:
> 
> > You do "git clean -ndX" to see
> > _everything_ that is untracked, and "git clean -nd" to see things that
> > are untracked but not ignored.
> 
> No, the capital X tells clean to only list excluded files.  The
> standard use is as a poor man’s “make maintainer-clean”, leaving
> unrelated files alone.

Ah, I read it as "-x" (probably because I had never heard of "-X"
either...).

So yes, it would do the right thing. I still think a --show-ignored
option to git-status would probably be better (in addition to being
sanctioned plumbing, it means we only have to traverse the tree once
for Eric's case, instead of twice).

> I only learned about it just now.  I’m glad I did (I often use the
> lowercase version for this because I just didn’t know about -X), but
> as you mentioned, it is not so applicable here because not plumbing.

The "-X" mode seems much safer to me, as you are less likely to blow
away things you actually wanted to keep while cleaning the tree of
crufty build products. It seems like it should have been the
easier-to-type "-x", but it is far too late for such bikeshedding at
this point.

Thanks for the pointer.

-Peff