From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2012 21:59:14 GMT
Subject: Re: Feature suggestion: new 'git add -i' command to discard working copy changes
Message-ID: <20121218215914.GB1806@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <7vvcbzdoy9.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Tue, Dec 18, 2012 at 01:34:38PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Evan Driscoll <driscoll@cs.wisc.edu> writes:
> 
> > It's not infrequent that I want to discard changes I've made locally to
> > files ('git checkout file.txt') and find myself wishing that this was an
> > action available from the 'git add --interactive' UI; it feels like it
> > would fit in.
> 
> Hrm, not really.  "git add" is about manipulating the index and its
> promise is that it won't touch working tree files.  And people rely
> on that promise.
> 
> I can see how it would be useful to have a UI that is more
> interactive than CLI that shows you a list of paths and lets you
> pick from the list to run "git checkout" on, but I think "git add"
> is a bad match to it.

Yeah. We already generalized "git add -p" to "git checkout -p" (and
"reset -p", etc) to do hunk selection. Nobody bothered to generalize
the rest of "git add --interactive", but logically having "git checkout
--interactive" (and "git reset --interactive") would make sense.

I always assumed nobody really used the full "add -i", but maybe it is
because I am such a command-line snob. Evan, are you after hunk
selection (like choosing "patch" from the interactive UI), or full path
selection?

-Peff