From: Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.org>
Date: Sun, 16 Mar 2014 21:22:42 GMT
Subject: Should 'git reset --hard' keep a stashed backup?
Message-ID: <EF7B8A31C59946F8821697F3BA129043@PhilipOakley>

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.

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.

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

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.

--

Philip


[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/git-users/CwQyfwnzCVM