Re: Revert a single commit in a single file

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Feb 25, 2011, 18:53 UTC
Message-ID: <7v8vx4aqun.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTikpdGfAAUMu_7DfA-GRUv7gKn5Yc9RnJwo2iKoM@mail.gmail.com>

Thomas Ferris Nicolaisen <tfnico@gmail.com> writes:

Show 12 quoted lines

> I tried asking the same question on the "newbie" list some time ago:
>
> http://groups.google.com/group/git-users/browse_thread/thread/d562b4eeac016711
>
> Basically, when I go
>> git revert <commit> <path>
>
> .. my expectation was that a new commit would be made reverting the
> changes from the old commit, but only for specified path/file.
>
> Maybe it's a bit of a corner-case, but still would be nice to have
> once in a while. What do you think?

I am afraid that it would lead to encouraging people to record a horribly broken history, unless you think carefully about what the resulting commit log message should describe. It would look _as if_ you negated the effect of the original commit as a whole, but in reality you are only reverting just a part of what you chose to revert with <path>.

We do encourage people to record the _reason_ why the particular commit was removed by not supporting "-m <message>" option to "git revert" command, but the commit template in the editor given to the user should make it absolutely clear that the particular partial revert is reverting only a part of the original commit, and need additional words to strongly encourage to record why only that part and not other parts are reverted.