Re: [PATCH] cmd_reset: don't trash uncommitted changes unless told to

From: Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu>
Date: Jun 25, 2008, 20:38 UTC
Message-ID: <20080625203822.GA7827@mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <32541b130806251304u39c8ffdenc52904391aebd089@mail.gmail.com>

On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 04:04:47PM -0400, Avery Pennarun wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> How about making "git checkout" default to HEAD if no revision is
> supplied?  There's precedent for this in, say, git-diff (and I think a
> few others).
> 
> Incidentally, "checkout <filename>" was also the way to do a revert
> operation in CVS.  And the way to switch branches, too, iirc.  So git
> isn't being too unusual here.  That said, the commands were
> deliberately renamed in svn because CVS was considered largely insane.

The one thing I would worry about is the potential ambiguity if you do something like "git checkout FOOBAR", and FOOBAR was both a branch name as well as a file name. How should it be interpreted? I'd argue the real problem was we conflated two distinct operations: "switching to a new branch", and "reverting a file" to the same name, checkout.

Hence the suggestion to add a new command, "git revert-file", where there would be no ambiguity.

							- Ted