Re: [RFC] reset --hard: warn before discarding staged content with no commit history

From: Koutsouflakis Stefanos <koutsouflakis.stefanos@proton.me>
Date: Dec 14, 2025, 13:29 UTC
Message-ID: <Ai2bA2Zt8bsexgQEIKg1vK7-SNNhTlsmmFp_gOJp8IKX9dJME7UC97EtqRhAUfD00sFmqRdHg9xgGW82rikrLIDUIswrUPr3RKm-LQgGuNY=@proton.me>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqzf7ocrhk.fsf@gitster.g>

On Friday, December 12th, 2025 at 05:25, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

> I doubt that special casing an empty tree would fly well.

I might be missing something, could you say more about what makes this problematic? If it is about breaking existing workflows: any script that automates either of the two use-cases discussed would be relying on behavior that is almost certainly unintended. Such scripts would fail, but without data loss, and give authors a clear signal to fix a likely bug.

> And I do not have any better ideas.  Other than just failing, that is.
> But that leads to nonsense combination "--hard --force", just as
> idiotic combination as "rm -f -i" :-/

There might be other ways to mitigate this, e.g.:
a) Refuse with a fatal error and hint the user
   to remove staged content with "git rm --cached -r ."
b) Autostash with a warning

Thanks, Stefanos