Re: Question about 'branch -d' safety

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 20, 2010, 13:19 UTC
Message-ID: <AANLkTilOhFqhg1ulWEZUceNmrf0djZti9E1Y2QzTRgaN@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7v7hkrpcrk.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 18:06, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> Clemens Buchacher <drizzd@aon.at> writes:
>
>> Pros and cons for "undeleting branches":
>>
>> + safety net
>> It should not be easy to lose information with git.
>
> I am personally not very convinced by this argument when it comes to the
> cases where the user actively asks us to remove something.

I think it's mainly about user interface consistency. When you "delete" stuff in with git reset (i.e. move the HEAD) it's recorded in the reflog, but this isn't the case with branch deletions.

As Will Palmer pointed out, being able to tell newbies "Don't worry, you aren't going to break it" is a very powerful thing to be able to tell newbies and experienced users using Git.

It encourages experimentation, because you know that even if you botch the rewrite and delete the wrong branch it's easy to recover your work from the reflog in the morning.

I'd really like something like Joshua Jensen's suggestion for recording a fake branch deletion commit in the reflog.