Re: Feature request: Allow extracting revisions into directories

From: Tomas Carnecky <tomas.carnecky@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 4, 2013, 12:47 UTC
Message-ID: <1359982065-ner-9588@calvin>
In-Reply-To: <1359980045.24730.32.camel@t520>

On Mon, 04 Feb 2013 13:14:05 +0100, Robert Clausecker <fuzxxl@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> Of course that is a possibility but it does not not feel right and is
> not intuitive. Adding this feature won't cause feature creep but would
> rather add an operation that makes sense in some scenarios and reduces
> the dependencies on other commands that might not be available on other
> platforms (If you care about that).

I'd really like to see your reply to Sitaram's email regarding the many options that tar has. Sure, just teaching git-archive the equivalent of `|tar -x' probably isn't feature creep. But why stop there and not add some of the other options as well? After all, some might be equally useful in a different situation. So where do you stop? When you've completely merged tar into git?

> Also, this functionality is in full accordance with the Unix principle
> as it is a basic operation ("put tree into files") and not something
> super special.

That's what `git checkout` is for. And I would even argue that it's the better choice in your situation because it would delete files from /var/www/foo which you have deleted in your repo. git archive|tar wouldn't do that.