meson dist is confused

[matthiasclasen]

Describe the bug
meson dist refuses to operate, claiming that the repository contains uncommitted changes, when that is not the case.

To Reproduce

$ meson dist -C release_build/
ERROR: Repository has uncommitted changes that will not be included in the dist tarball
Use --allow-dirty to ignore the warning and proceed anyway
$ git diff
$ 

Expected behavior

meson dist should work.

If there is actually something 'dirty' about my checkout, then meson should not be so tight-lipped and tell me what it is.

system parameters

This is meson 1.3.2 on Fedora 40

[eli-schwartz]

def have_dirty_index(self) -> bool:
    '''Check whether there are uncommitted changes in git'''
    ret = subprocess.call(['git', '-C', self.src_root, 'diff-index', '--quiet', 'HEAD'])
    return ret == 1

I don't think this is being particularly tight-lipped. I actually have no clue what the difference is, and we didn't expect there to be one, so it didn't seem like something that needed to be reported...

[eli-schwartz]

What's the output of git status? Do you have staged-but-not-committed changes?

[bgilbert]

This can be reproduced by touching a tracked file in the repo before running meson dist. Unlike git status and git diff, git diff-index doesn't refresh the index before comparing, so stat changes are assumed to imply content changes. I'm currently working around this in some automation by updating the index with git update-index -q --refresh before running meson dist.

[tristan957]

@bgilbert have time to submit a patch?

[bgilbert]

Sure, PR in #13152.