i understand, and i get why that's useful from a performance perspective. but i think i'm arguing at a different level. i'm saying: `--name-only` can change whether a file appears in `git diff`'s output or not. that is surprising, because the documentation mentions nothing about this, nor does the flag itself sound like it would. my argument is that the non-buggy behavior would be to make `--name-only` more consistent with the rest of `git diff`, because it would be less surprising. the fact that `git diff` does not look at file contents when the flag is given to me is just an implementation detail. best, arne
