From: Michael Haggerty Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2010 08:44:41 GMT Subject: Re: Git terminology: remote, add, track, stage, etc. Message-ID: <4CBFFD79.1010808@alum.mit.edu> In-Reply-To: On 10/18/2010 11:57 PM, Jakub Narebski wrote: > Well, there is different suggestion: make `git stage`, `git track` and > `git mark-resolved` to be *specializations* of `git add`, with added > safety checks: 'git stage' would work only on files known to git / > under version control already, 'git track' would work only on > untracked files (and do what 'git add -N' does), and 'git mark-resolved' > would work only on files which were part of a merge conflict. I think that is a great idea. The thing that I found most confusing when learning git is that variations on a single command often have very different effects. My pet peeve is the over-versatile "git checkout": git checkout BRANCH : Check out a branch. This is the functionality that I would expect from a "checkout" command. git checkout -b NEWBRANCH OLDBRANCH : For me this was unintuitive, because (IMO) the main effect of the command is to create a new branch. (I consider that more significant than the checkout because it has a persistent effect on the repository.) Therefore, I would expect this functionality to be provided by "git branch" (something like "git branch --checkout NEWBRANCH OLDBRANCH"). git checkout -b NEWBRANCH : This is even more unintuitive, because no content is being checked out at all. This should be written "git branch --checkout NEWBRANCH". git checkout -- PATH : To me this is again a totally different operation. The other uses of "git checkout" are safe; they don't lose any information. But this usage discards the working copy changes irretrievably. Such a different operation deserves a different command with a "dangerous-sounding" name. I think this functionality should be made more easily accessible via "git reset", as has been suggested elsewhere on this thread. (Unfortunately "git revert" is already taken.) git checkout BRANCH -- PATH : This is even more perverse. Usually "check out" makes the working copy more similar to a version in the repository. But this command makes it more different. Michael -- Michael Haggerty mhagger@alum.mit.edu http://softwareswirl.blogspot.com/