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

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 16, 2019, 19:36 UTC
Message-ID: <87wolzo7a1.fsf@evledraar.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20190216114938.18843-2-pclouds@gmail.com>

On Sat, Feb 16 2019, Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy wrote:

[Re-CC some people involved the last time around]

Show 6 quoted lines

> A new attribute "precious" is added to indicate that certain files
> have valuable content and should not be easily discarded even if they
> are ignored or untracked.
>
> So far there are one part of Git that are made aware of precious
> files: "git clean" will leave precious files alone.

Thanks for bringing this up again. There were also some patches recently to save away clobbered files, do you/anyone else have any end goal in mind here that combines this & that, or some other thing I may not have kept up with?

My commentary on this whole thing is basically a repeat of what I said in https://public-inbox.org/git/87wop0yvxv.fsf@evledraar.gmail.com/

I.e. we have a definite problem here somewhere, and there is some solution, but this patch feels a bit like navigating that maze in the dark without a map.

We had users report that the likes of "pull" were eating their data, but now with this iteration of "precious" only impacting "clean" the only problem anyone with the current semantics is still left unaddressed. My memory (I may be wrong) is that "clean" was just brought up (by you?) as a "what about this other related case?" in that whole discussion.

So as noted in the E-Mail linked above I think the first step should be to enumerate/document/test the cases where we're now eating data implicitly, and discuss how that relates to the semantics we desired when the data-eating behavior was first introduced (as noted in E-Mails linked from the above, my own preliminary digging seems to reveal there isn't much of a relationship between the two).

Only when we have that list of XYZ cases we're supporting now, and can see that XYZ is so important to maintain backwards compatibility for that we can't change it should way say "we eat your data by default because XYZ is so useful/backcompat, set 'precious' ...".

But right now we don't even have the list of XYZ or tests for them (as my RFC "garbage" attribute patch revealed). So this whole thing still feels like jumping three steps ahead to me in terms of addressing *that* issue, but perhaps you have some orthogonal use-case in mind for this?