Re: [RFC] Add warning when git discard changes on another branch?

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: May 8, 2017, 04:19 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqlgq89dzl.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqvapc9fsg.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

Show 8 quoted lines

> But to help "some users are not aware of this" situation, an opt-in
> "feature" would not help all that much.  The same number of lines in
> the documentation to tell end-users how to toggle on such a "safety"
> feature can be spent to teach them that their local changes in the
> working tree do *not* belong to any particular branch, and as soon
> as it is understood, the user would be OK.
>
> So...

It might help if we treat this similarly to how we treat the "detached HEAD" state. By default when you do "git checkout HEAD^0" (not "git checkout --detach HEAD"), you would get a large warning, which you can silence by the advice.detachedhead configuration. In addition to the list of "these paths have local modifications" that we show as a reminder, perhaps you want to show a warning that tells the user that the local modifications in these paths are not recorded anywhere else, or somesuch, and silence it with a new advice.* variable?