Re: [RFC/PATCH 1/2] reset: learn to reset to tree

Martin von Zweigbergk <martinvonz@gmail.com> writes:

When I am trying to check out contents of Documentation/ directory as of an older edition because we made mistakes updating the files in recent versions, with "git checkout v1.9.0 Documentation/", for example. Perhaps somebody had this bright idea of reformatting our docs with "= Newer Style =" section headers, replacing the underline style, and we found our toolchain depend on the underline style, or something. The new files in the same directory added since v1.9.0 may share the same mistake as the files whose recent such changes I am nuking with this operation, but that does not mean I want to retype the contents of them from scratch; I'd rather keep them around so that I can fix them up by hand.

I would have to say that it is more common; I do not recall a time I wanted to replace everything in a directory (and only there without touching other parts of the tree) with an old version, removing new ones. "git checkout [$commit] $paths" is still an operation to help me build new history forward starting from HEAD, and is not about start building on top of the old $commit. Losing the work I've done to the files that did not exist in $commit:$paths is almost always *not* what I would expect to happen with the command.