Re: 'commit -a' safety (was: Re: Please default to 'commit -a' when no changes were added)

From: Nicolas Pitre <nico@fluxnic.net>
Date: Apr 24, 2010, 19:09 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.2.00.1004241503370.7232@xanadu.home>
In-Reply-To: <20100424185433.GN3563@machine.or.cz>

On Sat, 24 Apr 2010, Petr Baudis wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> On Sat, Apr 24, 2010 at 02:35:17PM -0400, Nicolas Pitre wrote:
> > In that case the deficiency is in the fact that no reflog preserves the 
> > intermediate state of the index, not the fact that you might be allowed 
> > to do it.  Strictly speaking there is no intermediate ref to log, but a 
> > synthetic commit could be created for this case just like a stash but 
> > stored in the current branch's reflog.
> 
> Possibly, but I don't see how is this better than the check - it is less
> user friendly, most importantly because user that has not seen this
> twice has no idea that anything *was* saved to a reflog.

Possibly. But the fact that some data could be lost here is a flaw. The reflog is the safety net making sure that whatever the user does is not completely destructive.

> Are there valid user scenarios where you customize your index, then want
> to override that using -a without thinking twice?

Admittedly there aren't many. And in those few hypothetical cases then requiring -f would be acceptable.

Nicolas