[gentoo-user] OT: git, how to compare a repo with a loose tree

[gentoo-user] OT: git, how to compare a repo with a loose tree

[Ian Zimmerman]

I would like to use "git diff" to show differences between the
current state of a git repository and a normal directory tree somewhere
on the filesystem, ie. one without a .git subdirectory.  This is proving
surprisingly hard to do.

git diff has a documented mode to compare general "paths" as they call
it: the --no-index option.  But when I try it like this inside a git repo,

 git diff --no-index . /somedir

git apparently "forgets" that the current directory is a repo, and just
basically apes diff -r.  This means it doesn't know which files are
tracked, and in particular it reports every freaking file under ./.git
as deleted.  And there is no exclude option that I see.  Argh!  How can
I get around this?

If it matters: I'm fine with assuming the repo is clean ie. no
uncommitted changes, so the current state can be represented as any of:
working tree, "index" or HEAD.

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Re: [gentoo-user] OT: git, how to compare a repo with a loose tree

[Michael Orlitzky]

On 12/07/2017 09:58 PM, Ian Zimmerman wrote:
> I would like to use "git diff" to show differences between the
> current state of a git repository and a normal directory tree somewhere
> on the filesystem, ie. one without a .git subdirectory.  This is proving
> surprisingly hard to do.

If "git diff" isn't important, I was able to fake something close but
not quite like it:

  colordiff --recursive \
            --suppress-common-lines \
            --unified \
            --exclude=.git \
            --new-file \
            <src> \
            <dst> \
  | most

That uses app-misc/colordiff to colorize the diff output, and
sys-apps/most as my pager.