Improve behavior of dulwich.porcelain.add

[dclong]

By default, dulwich.porcelain.add add files from the current working directory rather the root directory of the specified repository. This can be confirm by the highlighted code in the screenshot below. I personally think it is better to add files from the root directory of the repository by default.

[dclong]

What's more, if the current working directory of Python is not /tmp/test_dulwich, the following code doesn't add anything into stage.

dulwich.porcelain.add("/tmp/dulwich", "/tmp/dulwich")

This is rather inconvenient if users have to work across multiple local repositories.

[jelmer]

The idea is that "porcelain.add" works the same way that "git add" does - in the same way that other commands in the porcelain module do. This means behaviour relative to the current working directory. I'm open to suggestions for improvements that make this less confusing. If you want a lower level interface, Repo.stage is the right function to call.

[AlpBilgin]

Hello @jelmer,

I came here to complain about the same behavior, then I figured it out after reading your message and thinking "oh this sounds like I missed something in the docs."

Assuming I make a wrapper with convenience functions:

from dulwich import porcelain
class GitClient:
    def __init__(self, path: str, remote: str,):
        self.remote = remote
        self.path = path
        self.repo = porcelain.clone(remote, path)


    def git_add_commit_push(self, commit_message):
        porcelain.add(self.repo, self.path)
        porcelain.commit(self.repo, commit_message)
        porcelain.push(self.repo, self.remote)

it isn't immediately obvious from the doc wording that add() will scan anything and everything under CWD, if I don't pass self.path which is where I initialized the repo.

I assume there is a good reason why this is the default behavior, but it is very counterintuitive to try and add files that are outside of the repo that the self.repo pointer is pointing to.

It might be reasonable to warn users in the docs just in case.

edit: after fiddling around a bit more I noticed that giving the folder path doesn't actually work. It seemed to work because I am using this for a very specific use case and it is possible to make this work for my use case due to a side effect from my badly designed tests. For the reader I suggest enumerating the dirty files in the target dir and giving them to .add() as an explicit list.

[jelmer]

dulwich.porcelain is meant to provide the same behaviour as the "git" command-line tool, which also takes into account the current working directory.

If you're after lower level access, use the dulwich.repo.Repo object, which has a stage() method.