Re: pull into dirty working tree

From: Bill Lear <rael@zopyra.com>
Date: Jun 13, 2007, 18:12 UTC
Message-ID: <18032.13176.649702.276044@lisa.zopyra.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0706131916270.5241@castor.milkiway.cos>

On Wednesday, June 13, 2007 at 19:31:50 (+0200) Michael Dressel writes:

Show 11 quoted lines

>Hi,
>
>but even if they just play with the code. Why not always commit?
>As long as they don't push nobody else will be affected.
>
>Even if you play with the code it's useful to go back to earlier 
>versions. Why would you not want to benefit from this possibility?
>
>So this would really only be two commands the commit and the pull command.
>
>I hope I didn't miss your point completely.

Not completely: they don't want to commit, as this will then "pollute" the history in their working repository (which is just temporarily being used to play with a new feature, idea, bug fix, optimization, etc.). This pollution with a handful of garbage would then have to be undone were they to say "ok, that's really not a good idea". If a pull into a dirty tree were possible, that last step could be just a simple reset, or continuing to explore with the code, etc.

Their benchmark is CVS: CVS lets them do this easily (and yes, I understand that CVS sucks compared to git, so don't even start), and so even if they have to have 2 commands to do what they did in CVS with 1, they complain. My job is to either justify what git does to them to shut them up, or to speak to the git community to see if their desires are remotely rational.

It seems to me, based on several posts here, particularly Junio's, that they are being remotely rational and it might be a reasonable addition to git to be able to say "git pull --dirty" or whatever...

Bill