Re: Untracked working tree files

> On Wed, 15 Oct 2008, david@lang.hm wrote:
>>
>> the fact that git will happily leave modified things in the working directory
>> appears to be very helpful for some developers, but it's also a big land mine
>> for others.
>
> Hmm. It doesn't actually do that normally. If you switch between trees,
> git will (or _should_) remove the old files that it knows about. If you
> get a lot of left-over turds, there's something wrong.
>
> It could be a git bug, of course. That said, especially considering the
> source of this, I wonder if it's just that Andrew ends up using all those
> non-git scripts on top of a git tree, and then that can result in git
> *not* knowing about a certain file, and then when switching between trees
> (with either git checkout or with git reset), the data that was created
> with non-git tools gets left behind and now git will be afraid to
> overwrite it.
>
> So yes, there are ways to force it (both "git checkout -f"  and "git reset
> --hard" having already been mentioned), but the need for that - especially
> if it's common - is a bit discouraging.
>
> Especially since it's still possible that it's some particular mode of git
> usage that leaves those things around. Andrew - have you any clue what it
> is that triggers the behavior?

> (By the filename, I realize it's a file that doesn't exist in one tree or
> the other, and which doesn't get removed at some point. But have you had
> merge failures, for example? Is it perhaps a file that was created during
> a non-clean merge, and then got left behind due to the merge being
> aborted? It would be interesting to know what led up to this..)
>
> 			Linus
>