git-diff: resurrect the traditional empty "diff --git" behaviour

The warning message to suggest "Consider running git-status" from
"git-diff" that we experimented with during the 1.5.3 cycle turns
out to be a bad idea.  It robbed cache-dirty information from people
who valued it, while still asking users to run "update-index --refresh".
It was hoped that the new behaviour would at least have some educational
value, but not showing the cache-dirty paths like before meant that the
user would not even know easily which paths were cache-dirty, and it
made the need to refresh the index look like even more unnecessary chore.

This commit reinstates the traditional behaviour, but with a twist.

By default, the empty "diff --git" output is totally squelched out
from "git diff" output.  At the end of the command, it automatically
runs "update-index --refresh" as needed, without even bothering the
user.  In other words, people who do not care about the cache-dirtyness
do not even have to see the warning.

The traditional behaviour to see the stat-dirty output and to bypassing
the overhead of content comparison can be specified by setting the
configuration variable diff.autorefreshindex to false.

Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 5 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/diff.c b/diff.c
index a7e76719d1..0d30d05263 100644
--- a/diff.c
+++ b/diff.c
@@ -19,6 +19,7 @@
 static int diff_detect_rename_default;
 static int diff_rename_limit_default = -1;
 static int diff_use_color_default;
+int diff_auto_refresh_index = 1;
 
 static char diff_colors[][COLOR_MAXLEN] = {
 	"\033[m",	/* reset */
@@ -166,6 +167,10 @@ int git_diff_ui_config(const char *var, const char *value)
 			diff_detect_rename_default = DIFF_DETECT_RENAME;
 		return 0;
 	}
+	if (!strcmp(var, "diff.autorefreshindex")) {
+		diff_auto_refresh_index = git_config_bool(var, value);
+		return 0;
+	}
 	if (!prefixcmp(var, "diff.")) {
 		const char *ep = strrchr(var, '.');