Re: [PATCH 2/2] read-tree: at least one tree-ish argument is required

From: Johannes Sixt <j.sixt@viscovery.net>
Date: Dec 18, 2009, 22:04 UTC
Message-ID: <200912182304.27656.j.sixt@viscovery.net>
In-Reply-To: <7veimsvz8a.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Freitag, 18. Dezember 2009, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> I'll grant you that at least "rm -rf it" names "it" that will be wiped
> very explicitly.  But just like the index and the work tree plus the index
> are the implicit targets to "reset" and "reset --hard" respectively, the
> index is the implicit target to "read-tree".
>
> [...]  You might type
> "commit" when you meant to say "commit -a" and record an incomplete state;
> it is "dangerous" in that sense.
>
> These are part of their feature.

Really? "rm -rf", "reset --hard", "commit -a": yes, RTFM. But "read-tree" (w/o arguments): no. There is no such sign in the documentation. Since the operation of the latter is dubious at best, I'd rather change the program than the documentation.

How about this commit message, then?

Subject: [PATCH] read-tree: at least one tree-ish argument is required

Running read-tree without any arguments purges the index, but this is not documented. This behavior is dubious at best because contrary to many other commands, it does not use HEAD if nothing else is specified.

If one really wants to clear the index, this can be achieved with 'git rm --cached .' or 'rm -f .git/index' in a more explicit way.

Signed-off-by: Johannes Sixt <j6t@kdbg.org>