RE:

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: May 7, 2009, 23:18 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.2.01.0905071613130.4983@localhost.localdomain>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.1.10.0905071607080.15782@asgard>

On Thu, 7 May 2009, david@lang.hm wrote:

> 
> what about a reset --hard? (is there any command that would force the files to
> be re-written, no matter what git thinks is already there)

No, not "git reset --hard" either, I think. Git very much tries to avoid rewriting files, and if you've told it that file contents are stable, it will believe you.

In fact, I think people used CE_VALID explicitly for the missing parts of "partial checkouts", so if we'd suddenly start writing files despite them being marked as ok in the tree, I think we'd have broken that part.

(Although again - I'm not sure who would use CE_VALID and friends).

If you want to force everything to be rewritten, you should just remove the index (or remove the specific entries in it if you want to do it just to a particular file) and then do a "git checkout" to re-read and re-populate the tree.

But I'm not really seeing why you want to do this. If you told git that it shouldn't care about the working tree, why do you now want it do care?

			Linus