Re: [PATCH 6/3] revert: remove --reset compatibility option

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Nov 22, 2011, 23:11 UTC
Message-ID: <20111122231145.GE6274@elie.hsd1.il.comcast.net>
In-Reply-To: <7vzkfnde05.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> If we want to reach this point eventually, given that --reset was not in
> any released version, and also given that we are deep in pre-release
> phase, we probably should either just apply the first one (and perhaps
> this one) from the series immediately before 1.7.8 final, or delay the
> final and swallow the entire series.

Makes sense.

> I am not quite convinced that quit is *that* superiour over reset
> though. The description in 1/3 "has a confusing name" does not say why it
> is confusing, either, to help readers agree with the conclusion.

Ok, a few words about this.

I should say that I am not deeply attached to --quit. If some other word for "abandon" (or some other concept entirely) is more obvious, I'd be happy to see it used. From a couple of days of practice, I can say that --quit feels fine in a way that --reset didn't, but not much more.

--reset is a cognate to "git reset", the command to make some combination of the HEAD, index, and worktree just so. In other contexts --- rebooting a machine, resetting an alarm clock --- to reset something also means to return it to a known state. By contrast, the "git cherry-pick --abandon" command is about leaving the state alone as much as possible while escaping from the context of a cherry-pick sequence.

How does that do harm, though? My main fear is that people would not notice that --reset is the option they want to use and would opt to "rm -r .git/sequencer" instead, which is a kind of error-prone wizardry that should not be required.

(I assume cherry-pick --reset was named by analogy with "git bisect reset", the command to abandon a bisection and return to the branch you were on before bisection, or a branch or commit named on the command line. Which is not analagous to cherry-pick --abandon at all. The command people often run, "git bisect reset HEAD", is a closer analog if you squint right.)