Re: Suggestion: make git checkout safer

From: John Szakmeister <john@szakmeister.net>
Date: Jun 4, 2015, 09:01 UTC
Message-ID: <CAEBDL5XcEWpXeVjYb9spvy1QHbODbuvcXxFRp7_-hq=RNemyXA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqiob4wkem.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>

On Wed, Jun 3, 2015 at 5:29 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote: [snip]

Show 16 quoted lines

> [Footnote]
>
> *1* In the context of this discussion, after screwing up the change
>     in hello.c, instead of expressing the wish to recover and to
>     start from scratch in two separate commands, i.e.
>
>         rm hello.c && update-from-scm
>
>     they will learn to use a single command that is designed for
>     that purpose, i.e.
>
>         checkout-from-scm hello.c
>
>     without the "rm" step, which _is_ an artificial workaround for
>     their other SCMs that do not update from the repository unless
>     they remove the files.

Just to be clear, Subversion doesn't require you to remove the file to restore it (I'm sure most of you know that, but just in case others didn't). There is a one-step way to restore the file:

    svn revert hello.c

Unfortunately, revert in the Git sense is about reverting commits, so there's a bit of friction between Subversion and Git's terminology. OTOH, once the team was educated how to think about it, "git checkout <path>" has been pretty natural to use.

-John