From: Tim Retout Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2009 21:19:55 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH] builtin-reset.c: Extend hard reset error message when using paths. Message-ID: <1239657595.4641.50.camel@arneb.retout.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <7vr5zwe3ie.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org> On Mon, 2009-04-13 at 12:51 -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote: > Tim Retout writes: > > > Users who invoke 'git reset --hard ' are probably trying to > > update paths in their working directory. The error message should > > point them in the direction of git-checkout(1). > > That is one possibility. Another is: > > git reset --hard mester > > (and you have ./mester file in the work tree) and in that case the user > definitely didn't want to do any checkout. I would think that this sort of typo is sufficiently rare that it should not cause confusion - at least, no more than 'Cannot do hard reset with paths.', which would be the current message. > I wonder if you can tell these cases apart, and also if this (not just > telling these apart, but what your patch adds) is worth additional > cluttering in the running program. Well, in my opinion the cluttering is minimal, and a line similar to this would be useful to help these users find the right documentation... > I certainly wouldn't mind addition to > git-reset manual page if new people are often confused between "checking > out paths from the index or from the named commit" and "resetting the HEAD > to a different commit while nuking the index and the work tree state", > though. ...and a note in the man page would be helpful as well, similar to that in git-revert(1). I'm happy to come up with something. I'm aiming to reduce the frequency with which I get asked for help with reverting a file. Perhaps adding a form to 'revert' is what I really want to do. -- Tim Retout