Re: [BUG] rebase --interactive silently overwrites ignored files

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: May 5, 2019, 04:02 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqq4l69tupt.fsf@gitster-ct.c.googlers.com>
In-Reply-To: <3bf0f04d-83d4-ef13-8e19-a679b4153793@gmail.com>

Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com> writes:

Show 5 quoted lines

> I've had a look at the rebase -i code and I think it only overwrites
> ignored files when it is fast-forwarding. This matches what merge does
> when fast-forwarding but I'm not convinced either of them should be
> doing this by default (I think checkout doing it is probably asking
> for trouble)...

> I'll put a patch together to fix rebase -i, I'd like to see the
> defaults for merge and checkout changed but I'm not sure that would be
> popular.

I suspect that such a change in behaviour for "rebase -i" is not a fix but a regression. Shouldn't it be consistent with checkout and merge?

> It does seem like surprising behavior though when most
> operations try to preserve untracked files.

Are you conflating untracked and ignored?

Because we haven't adopted 'precious' (or whatever the final name would be), which is "ignored but not expendable", ignored files are by definition "ignored and expendable". When checkout (and merge that is its more general form) needs to match the working tree to the index contents and an ingored file is in the way, it should overwrite it.

Until we introduce "ignored but not expendable" class, that is.