threads / discuss / 16947

RE: for newbs = little exercise / tutorial / warmup for windows and other non-sophisticated new Git users :-) [Scanned]

Subject: RE: for newbs = little exercise / tutorial / warmup for windows and other non-sophisticated new Git users :-) [Scanned]

## tl;dr

2 messages between Dec 31, 2008 and Dec 31, 2008.

replies: 1people: 2as markdown or json

Conor Rafferty· Dec 31, 2008, 10:56 UTC · lore

And you would be wrong, IMHO. Many people have untracked files or directories in their working directory ('cause they are working there) that they don't want deleted willy-nilly. Build files, modifications that should be on a different branch, etc. There's another thread active on the list complaining that git removes too much from the working tree.

** An SCM should be able to cope with both use cases. In fact I make it easy for the SCM by deleting EVERYTHING from the working directory, before calling git-checkout.

Most users of SCMs do make active modifications to the files in the SCM. It's not a system only for archiving static projects.

** Archiving static projects is not the ONLY thing I want to do with my SCM, it just happens to be the FIRST thing.

Daniel Barkalow· Dec 31, 2008, 16:00 UTC · re: Conor Rafferty · lore

On Wed, 31 Dec 2008, Conor Rafferty wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> And you would be wrong, IMHO.  Many people have untracked files or
> directories in their working directory ('cause they are working there)
> that they don't want deleted willy-nilly.  Build files, modifications
> that should be on a different branch, etc.  There's another thread
> active on the list complaining that git removes too much from the
> working tree.
> 
> ** An SCM should be able to cope with both use cases. In fact I make it
> easy for the SCM by deleting EVERYTHING from the working directory,
> before calling git-checkout.

In this case, git thinks you actually meant to delete those tracked files, and does its best to not undelete them unless you ask it to get them back. Git is very careful not to lose your changes, which is very nice most of the time, but means that you can't make changes and expect git to lose them.

	-Daniel
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