Re: [RFC PATCH] Introduce "precious" file concept

From: Matthieu Moy <git@matthieu-moy.fr>
Date: Nov 12, 2018, 09:08 UTC
Message-ID: <1205132135.1189562.1542013731020.JavaMail.zimbra@matthieu-moy.fr>
In-Reply-To: <591ab1f7-ef39-13e5-83b8-76fe372ecc2c@hibox.tv>

"Per Lundberg" <per.lundberg@hibox.tv> wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> On 11/11/18 5:41 PM, Duy Nguyen wrote:
> > On Sun, Nov 11, 2018 at 1:33 PM Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
> > <avarab@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >> That will lose no data, and in the very rare cases where a checkout of
> >> tracked files would overwrite an ignored pattern, we can just error out
> >> (as we do with the "Ok to overwrite" branch removed) and tell the user
> >> to delete the files to proceed.
> > There's also the other side of the coin. If this refuse to overwrite
> > triggers too often, it can become an annoyance.

I may have missed some cases, but to me the cases when checkout may try to overwrite an ignored file are essentially:

* Someone "git add"ed a file meant to be ignored by mistake (e.g.
  "git add -f *.o").

* A file that was meant to be kept private (e.g. config.mak.dev) ends
  up being tracked. This may happen when we find a way to make per-developer
  settings the same for everyone.

I both cases I'd want at least to be notified that something is going on, and in the second I'd probably want to keep my local file around.

> If we feel thrashable is stretching it too far (which I don't think it
> is), we could add a "core.ignore_files_are_trashable" setting that
> brings back the old semantics, for those who have a strong feeling about it.

May I remind an idea I sugested in an old thread: add an intermediate level where ignored files to be overwritten are renamed (eg. foo -> foo~ like Emacs' backup files):

https://public-inbox.org/git/vpqd3t9656k.fsf@bauges.imag.fr/

One advantage of the "rename" behavior is that it's safer that the current, but still not very disturbing for people who like the current behavior. This makes it a good candidate for a default behavior.

This could come in complement with this thread's "precious" concept:

* If you know what you're doing and know that such or such file is precious,
  mark it as such and Git will never overwrite it.

* If you don't know about precious files, just keep the default setting and
  the worse that can happen is to get your file overwritten with a bakup
  of the old version kept around.

This would probably play better with a notion of "precious" files than with a notion of "trashable" files.

-- 
Matthieu Moy
https://matthieu-moy.fr/