Re: [PATCH] Documentation: add a planning document for the next CLI revamp

From: Sam Vilain <sam@vilain.net>
Date: Oct 30, 2008, 17:51 UTC
Message-ID: <1225389068.19891.28.camel@maia.lan>
In-Reply-To: <20081030143918.GB14744@mit.edu>

On Thu, 2008-10-30 at 10:39 -0400, Theodore Tso wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> * Add the command "git revert-file <files>" which is syntactic sugar for:
> 
>         git checkout HEAD -- <files>
> 
>   Rationale: Many other SCM's have a way of undoing local edits to a
>   file very simply, i.e."hg revert <file>" or "svn revert <file>", and
>   for many developers's workflow, it's useful to be able to undo local
>   edits to a single file, but not to everything else in the working
>   directory.  And "git checkout HEAD -- <file>" is rather cumbersome
>   to type, and many beginning users don't find it intuitive to look in
>   the "git-checkout" man page for instructions on how to revert a
>   local file.

Well, I don't have strong feelings on the exact command name used; I suggested "undo", probably also ambiguous. But still, a significant number of users are surprised when they type 'git revert' and they get a backed out patch. It's such an uncommon operation, it doesn't deserve to be triggered so easily. And reverting files to the state in the index and/or HEAD is a common operation that deserves being short to type.

Making it plain "revert" would violate expectations of existing users;
it seems a better idea to just deprecate it, and point the users to the
new method - cherry-pick --revert - or the command they might have meant
- whatever that becomes.

Sam.