Re: [PATCH] Documentation: suggest "reset --keep" to undo a commit

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jan 21, 2011, 20:28 UTC
Message-ID: <7vbp3aovbi.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20110121191459.GC16325@burratino>

Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:

Show 9 quoted lines

>> Please tell a story where keep makes more sense than hard by enhancing the
>> explanatory text <1> associated with this section.  The current text says
>> that the three topmost commit representing what you have recently worked
>> so far are all unwanted, strongly hinting that hard is more appropriate
>> thing to do than keep, which is not what we want if we are changing the
>> example to use keep.
>
> Maybe the best story would be "you have just explored a blind alley
> and decided the last three commits are not a good idea at all", with

That unfortunately does not seem to describe the nature of the local changes at all, which I think is the whole point of this topic to encourage use of --keep over --hard.

Show 7 quoted lines

>> It would be sufficient to just hint that the uncommitted changes that you
>> have in your working tree are unrelated to what these three commits wanted
>> to do (e.g. you always keep small changes around, such as debugging
>> printf's
>
> That use case is less interesting to me --- it is relatively harmless
> to clobber such content.

Actually I think that is the primary use case of the feature, as --keep was done as a parallel to the behaviour of checkout that checks out a different branch while keeping local changes.