Re: Suggestion: make git checkout safer

I'm not attached to the wording changes posted earlier. As I said, it is only a starting point.

I do feel that 'git checkout PATH' is rather a dangerous operation, and moreover a surprisingly dangerous one, since 'git checkout BRANCH' is careful not to lose local changes, as are other common commands like 'git pull'. In the documentation patch I tried to highlight the distinction between the two rather different, and perhaps even Jekyll-and-Hyde-like, modes of this command.

But rather than adding heavyhanded and redundant warnings to the documentation it would be better for the command not to be quite so sharp-edged. There is already a --force option for one mode, which could easily be made to apply to the other too (so local changes will not be discarded unless --force is given). Is the only argument against it that 'git checkout is intended to overwrite changes'? That seems a little circular since the question is whether its intended behaviour could change to something a little safer. Surely a sensible Huffman-coding of git commands would give longer and harder-to-type names like 'git checkout --force .' to relatively dangerous operations?

Or indeed, split out the two different modes into two separate commands. The job of reverting file contents seems like something for 'git clean'.

I've said all I have to say but I would like to ask, in the hope of becoming a better git user: if 'git checkout .' is not a safe way to restore missing files in the working tree, what is the recommended way to do that?

Thanks all for your comments and guidance.