RE:

> -----Original Message-----
> From: david@lang.hm [mailto:david@lang.hm]
> Sent: May 7, 2009 7:31 PM
> To: Linus Torvalds
> Cc: Bevan Watkiss; 'Alex Riesen'; Git Mailing List
> Subject: RE:
> 
> On Thu, 7 May 2009, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 7 May 2009, david@lang.hm wrote:
> >>
> >> what about a reset --hard? (is there any command that would force the
> files to
> >> be re-written, no matter what git thinks is already there)
> >
> > No, not "git reset --hard" either, I think. Git very much tries to avoid
> > rewriting files, and if you've told it that file contents are stable, it
> > will believe you.
> >
> > In fact, I think people used CE_VALID explicitly for the missing parts
> of
> > "partial checkouts", so if we'd suddenly start writing files despite
> them
> > being marked as ok in the tree, I think we'd have broken that part.
> >
> > (Although again - I'm not sure who would use CE_VALID and friends).
> >
> > If you want to force everything to be rewritten, you should just remove
> > the index (or remove the specific entries in it if you want to do it
> just
> > to a particular file) and then do a "git checkout" to re-read and
> > re-populate the tree.
> >
> > But I'm not really seeing why you want to do this. If you told git that
> it
> > shouldn't care about the working tree, why do you now want it do care?
> 
> to be able to manually recover from the case where someone did things that
> they weren't supposed to
> 
> removing the index and doing a checkout would be a reasonable thing to do
> (at least conceptually), I will admit that I don't remember ever seeing a
> command (or discussion of one) that would let me do that.