How to make Git "add --all" by default?

Question

I just ran into this message:

$ git add .
warning: You ran 'git add' with neither '-A (--all)' or '--ignore-removal',
whose behaviour will change in Git 2.0 with respect to paths you removed.
Paths like 'README.md' that are
removed from your working tree are ignored with this version of Git.

* 'git add --ignore-removal <pathspec>', which is the current default,
  ignores paths you removed from your working tree.

* 'git add --all <pathspec>' will let you also record the removals.

Run 'git status' to check the paths you removed from your working tree.

I think setting --all is a pretty sane default, since I can reset if something was added unexpectedly. How can I make that behavior default?

Answer 1

The warning you see comes from commit ccc663b, itself reworking commit 45c45e3.

That second commit does include:

git add: start preparing for "git add <pathspec>..." to default to "-A"

Plan to eventually make "git add" pretend as if "-A" is given when there is a pathspec on the command line.
When resolving a conflict to remove a path, the current code tells you to "git rm $path", but with such a change, you will be able to say "git add $path" (of course you can do "git add -A $path" today).

So with Git 2.0, git add . will do what you want, but right now, a git alias is the way to get this by default.

git config alias.a 'add -A .'

[alias] 
  a = add -A .

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This is now (March 2014) registered for the next release, with commit 160c4b1 and commit fdc97ab, for the next Git 2.0 (Q2 2014).