Re: [RFC] undo and redo

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Aug 24, 2005, 18:51 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0508241148480.3317@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <20050824181004.GA18790@hpsvcnb.fc.hp.com>

On Wed, 24 Aug 2005, Carl Baldwin wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

>
> Oops.  I forgot to actually exit from the script if git-diff-files is
> non-empty.
> 
> Also, looking at it now, I don't think keeping undo information in a
> stack is the right thing.  But keeping more than just one would be good.
> Oh well, my first shot is never perfect.  ;-)

I would actually argue that

	git checkout -b newbranch <undo-point>

is the perfect undo.

It leaves the old state in the old branch, and creates a new branch (and checks it out) with the state you want to revert to. The advantage is exactly that there is no "stack" of undo's: you can have multiple independent undo's pending, and you can continue development at any of them. And merge the results together.

Of course, right now we don't have a "delete branch" command, but it's really as simple as

	rm .git/refs/heads/branchname

(and eventually you may want to do a "git prune" to get rid of stale objects, but that's a separate issue).

		Linus