Re: Ambigious messages

Hi Eugen,

On Sat, Jul 31, 2021 at 2:56 AM Eugen Konkov <kes-kes@yandex.ru> wrote:

The error seems quite reasonable to me...but can I ask how you got into this state?

There's two ways I know of:

1) Setting a sparse-checkout to only have certain paths, and then
recreating a file outside the sparsity paths anyway.
2) Trying to adjust your sparse-checkout to have a different set of
paths, then hit Ctrl-C while it is in the middle of running.

Did you do one of these?  If not, what'd you do?  If so, which one?

I've only had confused users come to me when they did the latter; they apparently assumed Ctrl-C would abort the operation and return to the previous state, but it does not -- whatever was successfully checked out before they hit Ctrl-C remains written to the working copy, but the .git/info/sparse-checkout file is updated last so the system continues assuming the old checkout. I wonder if we need to add some special Ctrl-C handling inside sparse-checkout adjustments or something.

This error message is clearly suboptimal and should be improved. Alternatively, though, we could perhaps change the behavior so that when in a sparse-checkout and the file(s) that match are SKIP_WORKTREE but present anyway, we could just remove the file from the working copy (i.e. make it match the index).

The error message is correct, but this is the case Stolee was talking about recently where it'd be good to add an override to "git add" to allow adding it anyway and add information about using that option to this error message.

I'll give you three different ways you should be able to do it:

1. Since you wanted to just restore the file to the version in the
index (as per your `git checkout lib/Mojo/IOLoop/Stream.pm` command),
you can simply delete the file (`rm lib/Mojo/IOLoop/Stream.pm`) and
everything would be fine.

2. You could change your sparsity paths to include this file so it
doesn't think it should be excluded from the working tree, e.g. `git
sparse-checkout add lib/Mojo/IOLoop` or even `git sparse-checkout add
lib/Mojo/IOLoop/Stream.pm`.  That'd be most useful if you made
important edits to the file or want to continue editing the file and
committing changes in it.

3. You could just disable the sparse-checkout entirely (`git
sparse-checkout disable`).  That'd make it so you don't have to worry
about this path or any other being simultaneously excluded and present
in the working tree.  You should be able to fix things up normally.
And, if you want, when you're done fixing things up, then set up a
sparse-checkout again.

Yes, we need to improve some error messages here (and perhaps tweak some behavior as well). Thanks for the report.

Elijah