git/list[1] front-page[2] threads[3] people[4] search[5] about
 

Re: Question about 'branch -d' safety

From
Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com>
Date
Jul 19, 2010, 20:49 UTC
Message-ID
<201007192249.58357.jnareb@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To
<7v7hkrpcrk.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
On Mon, 19 Jul 2010, Junio C Hamano wrote:
Show 5 quoted lines
> If you take an analogy in say a file server implementation, yes, it should
> not be easy to lose information there.  But it is and should be easy to
> say "rm junk".  How would people recover from a mistake if they typed a
> wrong filename, "rm junio" to lose a precious file "junio", when they
> meant to lose "junk"?  They go to backups.

First, I guess that many people have 'rm' aliased to 'rm -i', so it asks for confirmation... though it only moves safety a bit, as 'rm -f junio' would be still dangerous.

Second, desktop environment have the notion of trashcan, where files to be deleted are moved, and kept for some time or untill trashcan is emptied (though it moves safety a bit to people using 'hard delete' instead of moving to trashcan). Or use undeletefs,

Show 5 quoted lines
>                                            Can't git users do the same? 
> After all, .git directory is stored on a filesystem of some sort, and
> taking a backup (you do take backups, don't you?) and picking the stuff
> you lost from there should be a standard procedure that can be learned
> outside of the context of git.
People expect version control system to protect them more from mistakes.
Sidenote: there aere requests in last Git User's Survey (from 2009) to
have safety net against losing changes due to "git reset --hard", in the
form of automatically stashing blobs or something.
Show 8 quoted lines
> 
> This is pretty-much a tangent, but I recall from time to time people
> wonder why the branch namespace is not flat.  If that is a common wish,
> your "tilde-suffix all the intermediate path components" trick could be
> used in later versions of git (perhaps 1.8.X series) to improve the system
> to allow "maint-1.7.0" branch and topic branches that forked from it
> e.g. "maint-1.7.0/fix-frotz" and "maint-1.7.0/fix-nitfol" peacefully
> co-exist.

Hmmmmm... true, this would make having 'foo' and 'foo/bar' branches coexists, whether they are loose or packed, and whether they have reflogs or not.

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland
Previous: Clemens BuchacherNext: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
Message 40 of 42 in “Question about 'branch -d' safety”
  1. Nanako ShiraishiDec 29, 2009
  2. Nicolas SebrechtDec 29, 2009
  3. Nanako ShiraishiDec 30, 2009
  4. Junio C HamanoDec 30, 2009
  5. Nicolas SebrechtDec 30, 2009
  6. Clemens BuchacherJul 10, 2010
  7. Jonathan NiederJul 10, 2010
  8. Jakub NarebskiJul 10, 2010
  9. Jonathan NiederJul 10, 2010
  10. Clemens BuchacherJul 11, 2010
  11. Jakub NarebskiJul 11, 2010
  12. Julian PhillipsJul 11, 2010
  13. Clemens BuchacherJul 11, 2010
  14. Junio C HamanoJul 11, 2010
  15. Jakub NarebskiJul 11, 2010
  16. Will PalmerJul 11, 2010
  17. Clemens BuchacherJul 12, 2010
  18. Junio C HamanoJul 12, 2010
  19. Clemens BuchacherJul 13, 2010
  20. Will PalmerJul 13, 2010
  21. Johannes SixtJul 13, 2010
  22. Will PalmerJul 13, 2010
  23. Clemens BuchacherJul 13, 2010
  24. Clemens BuchacherJul 17, 2010
  25. Jonathan NiederJul 18, 2010
  26. Jakub NarebskiJul 18, 2010
  27. Will PalmerJul 18, 2010
  28. Jakub NarebskiJul 18, 2010
  29. Will PalmerJul 19, 2010
  30. Jakub NarebskiJul 19, 2010
  31. Joshua JensenJul 19, 2010
  32. Clemens BuchacherJul 19, 2010
  33. Will PalmerJul 19, 2010
  34. Jakub NarebskiJul 19, 2010
  35. Joshua JensenJul 20, 2010
  36. Will PalmerJul 20, 2010
  37. Jakub NarebskiJul 19, 2010
  38. Junio C HamanoJul 19, 2010
  39. Clemens BuchacherJul 19, 2010
  40. Jakub NarebskiJul 19, 2010
  41. Ævar Arnfjörð BjarmasonJul 20, 2010
  42. Matthieu MoyJul 20, 2010

Read the whole thread, see it on lore, or plain text.

$ cat FOOTERMessages come from the public archive at lore.kernel.org/git, fetched every hour. The front page is chosen and written each morning by an AI editor and can be wrong; the threads themselves are the record. About and API. For agents: an MCP server at https://gitlist.dev/mcp, and any thread, story or person page as Markdown by adding .md to its URL (or sending Accept: text/markdown). Details in /llms.txt.