From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 20:13:00 GMT
Subject: Re: [BUG?] git checkout $commit -- somedir doesn't drop files
Message-ID: <20130917201259.GB16860@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqeh8nxltc.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>

On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 12:58:07PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> I could argue that the above intended behaviour is suboptimal and it
> should have been "the resulting paths in the index and the work tree
> that match the given pathspec must be identical to that of the
> tree-ish".  In the resulting index or working tree, paths that match
> "subdir" pathspec in the above result is subdir/a and subdir/b, and
> that is different from what exists in the given tree-ish (which has
> only subdir/a and not subdir/b), and under that modified definition,
> what the current one does is not correct.

Our emails just crossed, but I basically ended up saying a similar
thing.  Could we simply replace the "update_some" in builtin/checkout.c
with a two-way merge via unpack-trees?

> I vaguely recall arguing for the updated behaviour described in the
> above paragraph, and I even might have started working on it, but I
> do not think we changed this behaviour recently, unfortunately.

Yes, I did some digging and I think it has always been this way, even
before git-checkout was a builtin.

-Peff