Bug 227444

Created attachment 132585 [details]
screen capture of xcode source commit

following back-and-forth twitter & email communication, I am logging this to request the finer-grain selection of what may be included during a git commit.

Attached is a screen capture of an example of selective commit elements within Xcode. This can be easily found after downloading Xcode, creating a new sample project with a git repository and then committing using File > Source Control > Commit.

Key elements: patch 3 has been unselected for commit, the little down-pointing triangle on patch 4 gives the contextual options of opt-in or opt-out, or fully discarding the patch.  Within the left-side pane, the file  has a line through the checkbox, indicating it's not an all-inclusive commit since #3 is not included. Otherwise, it'd be a checkmark, or empty checkbox if all changes are excluded.  There are more features within the Xcode IDE in this commit view, but those are the most commonly used.

I use these features within Xcode frequently.  And my usage of Netbeans is increasing, plus its visualization for version diff in Netbeans is excellent so a logical upgrade would be opting out of specific changes.


Following are relevent email messages:
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FIRST MESSAGE
Hi Geertjan

I'm sending this message after you sent me a response twitter message.

After downloading, installing and quickly setting up Netbeans 7.3, I found one thing that I miss from another IDE is yet missing within 7.3.
Doing a Git Diff is great, especially visualizing the differences. People praise Netbeans over Eclipse for this ability, but it's about tie with Xcode (which I also use on a daily basis).  The git support built into Xcode provides the added ability of manually specifying which changes are included in a commit, a visual interactive git add during the commit process.  I use that feature almost 100% of the time when committing within Xcode, and makes commits much nicer, enabling me to avoid committing logging code but keep it live and active within the working tree.

That's just one micro part of Netbeans I know, but it's something that is worth mentioning, since Netbeans seems to be striving to be the top IDE for several platforms.

Thanks for your time.

-Tom Pace

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SECOND MESSAGE

Thanks for the feedback. If i understand correctly the feature you're looking for is to be able to commit just a part of local modifications (not all) in a file, in other words commit not on the granularity od whole files but on a finer level of patch hunks. I've heard something about this feature in other versioning systems (namely Mercurial, see http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/RecordExtension) and there was a request to implement it in the IDE.
The best would be to file a RFE in BZ so we can keep track of it and monitor the number of users asking for it. Then we can decide on a plan to implement it.
http://netbeans.org/bugzilla/enter_bug.cgi?product=versioncontrol

Thanks,
Ondra
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THIRD (FINAL) MESSAGE

Hi, thanks for responding/forwarding so quickly.

The feature is as you describe, a finer level than whole files.  

The following link describes this in detail.  The "Staging Patches" section at the bottom is particular about this feature. 
http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-Tools-Interactive-Staging

I will consider filing in bugzilla as you suggest.
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