Re: [RFC PATCH] Introduce "precious" file concept

From: Per Lundberg <per.lundberg@hibox.tv>
Date: Nov 12, 2018, 07:35 UTC
Message-ID: <591ab1f7-ef39-13e5-83b8-76fe372ecc2c@hibox.tv>
In-Reply-To: <CACsJy8CYpuc7-CZhk7kQQVQFxOfLFZu4TVpG=b0a7j8P1J394Q@mail.gmail.com>

On 11/11/18 5:41 PM, Duy Nguyen wrote:

> On Sun, Nov 11, 2018 at 1:33 PM Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
> <avarab@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

>> That will lose no data, and in the very rare cases where a checkout of
>> tracked files would overwrite an ignored pattern, we can just error out
>> (as we do with the "Ok to overwrite" branch removed) and tell the user
>> to delete the files to proceed. 
> There's also the other side of the coin. If this refuse to overwrite
> triggers too often, it can become an annoyance.

Sure, but doing "git checkout -f some_ref" instead of "git checkout some_ref" isn't really _that_ annoying, is it? I think, people (because of not having read/studied the .gitignore semantics well enough) having their files being overwritten _without realizing it_ is a bigger danger. But obviously there is a bit of treading a thin line here.

If we feel thrashable is stretching it too far (which I don't think it is), we could add a "core.ignore_files_are_trashable" setting that brings back the old semantics, for those who have a strong feeling about it.

It's also quite possible to do it the other way around - i.e. set "core.ignore_files_are_trashable" to true by default, and let the "new" behavior be opt-in. However, this might "miss the mark" in that those people who would really benefit from the new semantics might miss this setting, just like they could risk missing the "precious" setting.

(I also think "trashable" sounds better and is more clear & precise than "precious", for whatever that is worth.) -- Per Lundberg