Re: Should 'git reset --hard' keep a stashed backup?

From: Duy Nguyen <pclouds@gmail.com>
Date: Mar 16, 2014, 23:14 UTC
Message-ID: <CACsJy8CGvwEk4whaiEn5ccTyRKD4ZwUXqYVM9hTGfU7tYUdX=A@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <EF7B8A31C59946F8821697F3BA129043@PhilipOakley>

On Mon, Mar 17, 2014 at 5:17 AM, Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.org> wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> A bike-shedding thought:
> Many inexperienced users do a 'git reset --hard' only to discover they have
> deleted something important and want it back. (e.g. git-users yesterday [1])
>
> One possible option is that Git could "stash" the current work-tree contents
> (git stash create) into a commit and store its commit_id in a suitable
> file/variable such as RESET_HARD_HEAD (or GIT_RESET_HARD_HEAD), similar to
> FETCH_HEAD & MERGE_HEAD, so that it would be relatively easy to recover the
> prior state.

A while back I started to implement "undo" function for "git add". I think we could do the same here, when reset --hard is issued, store current SHA-1 in index to an index extension, also hash overwritten files in worktree and store it in the index extension as well. "reset --undo" can bring it back. Experienced user can turn this off via config variable, but it's default to on.

>
> By only storing the id in the file/env it would be overwritten on each
> usage, and the loose commits would be garbage collected eventually.

We have similar ideas, except I choose to store in the index instead.

>
> A suitable config variable would allow it to be enabled/disabled as
> appropriate to the user. (Perhaps enabled by default eventually?)

Yes. We could even bundle it to an advice.* knob. Experienced users will usually turn the advice off (and this behavior will be gone as the result).

> Given the prevalence of 'git reset --hard' within internet forum advice,
> would something like this be useful?  It could even be wrapped into a GSoC
> project.

We could go further to provide "git undo" interface that covers other areas as well, easier to discover than "reset --undo", but I'm not sure how this interface should work..

-- 
Duy