Re: Suggestion: make git checkout safer

I had expected that 'git checkout .' would fix up my working tree to make it match the repository (in this case, the current revision of the master branch). When I originally ran it I had deleted a couple of files from the working tree and wanted to restore them. However, I expected that if doing the checkout operation would lose data currently on disk then git would prompt me first.

To compare, 'git pull' will not silently overwrite local changes; it will prompt you to commit or stash them first. 'git checkout .' is a fairly innocuous-looking command; it doesn't contain any --force or --overwrite or other things that would make you think twice before typing it. So I suggest it should be equally safe to run.

The user interface might be something like:

% git checkout .
error: Your local changes to the following files would be overwritten:
        foo
You may want to commit or stash these changes, or delete the files if you
don't want them.  Use 'git checkout --force' to proceed, throwing away
local changes.
Aborting

If the checkout operation would only involve creating some files on disk which aren't currently there, then it would proceed without prompting.