Re: [PATCH 1/1] Introduce "precious" file concept

From: Steffen Jost <jost@tcs.ifi.lmu.de>
Date: Feb 20, 2019, 09:36 UTC
Message-ID: <6c40dcc2-5ef1-7cfb-858d-029b72fa3709@tcs.ifi.lmu.de>
In-Reply-To: <87h8cy6cme.fsf@evledraar.booking.com>

On 20.02.19 10:19, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> Most git users are at the level of only knowing very basic
> add/commit/pull/push command interaction. I feel strongly that we need
> to make our tools safe to use by default, and not require some
> relatively advanced "precious"/attribute facility to be carefully
> configured in advance so we don't throw away uncommitted work on the
> likes of merge/checkout.
> 
> 1. https://public-inbox.org/git/87zhuf3gs0.fsf@evledraar.gmail.com/
> 2. https://public-inbox.org/git/871s7r4wuv.fsf@evledraar.gmail.com/
>

+1 Please consider that silently deleting files is a no-go.

I teach computer science, and our switch from subversion to git for our second year programming projects caused a lot of grief, so much that my colleagues consider switching back to subversion as the point of first contact with revisioning.

Silently deleting partially revisioned files is a major source: students regularly destroy IDE or OS specific config files that they cannot restore themselves. (Project participants use all kinds of different IDEs on different OSs and thus have all kinds of weird hidden files that always manage to get checked into the repository, wreaking havoc on another's machine. So they get deleted and thus disturb the student that needed those files.) We do provide a huge .gitignore that ought to prevent this, but despite numerous warnings they only add it later, which then causes previously checked-in files to be lost upon switching between branches.

Please, by default, issue at least a warning before files are irrevocably los - or maybe keep a local snapshot of everything for the last few checkout in order to undo them?

Thanks,
  Steffen.

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