What's the point of saying "HEAD is now at ..."?

Junio C Hamano· Sep 14, 2012, 05:14 UTC · lore

I sometimes wonder what value the message is giving us.

For example, while reviewing a patch in my Emacs session, I may say

    | git am -s3c <RETURN>

which runs the command on the contents of the e-mail I am reading, to apply the patch. After that, I would go to a separate terminal and do things like "git show -U20", etc. Once I am done, I reset the temporary commit away, and get this:

    $ git reset --hard HEAD^
    HEAD is now at ce5cf6f Merge git://github.com/git-l10n/git-po

or often it is

    $ git reset --hard ko/master
    HEAD is now at ce5cf6f Merge git://github.com/git-l10n/git-po

In either case, I know where I am resetting to, so "HEAD is now at" is a less than useful noise. If it contained "HEAD was at ...", it may let me realize that I was still going to use the contents in some other way and quickly go back to it with another reset, with cut and paste or with HEAD@{1}. In either case, showing the tip of what I just discarded seems to be a lot more useful information than what we are currently giving the users.

Michael J Gruber· Sep 14, 2012, 10:48 UTC · re: Junio C Hamano · lore

Re: What's the point of saying "HEAD is now at ..."?

Junio C Hamano venit, vidit, dixit 14.09.2012 07:14:

Show 27 quoted lines

> I sometimes wonder what value the message is giving us.
> 
> For example, while reviewing a patch in my Emacs session, I may say
> 
>     | git am -s3c <RETURN>
> 
> which runs the command on the contents of the e-mail I am reading,
> to apply the patch.  After that, I would go to a separate terminal
> and do things like "git show -U20", etc.  Once I am done, I reset
> the temporary commit away, and get this:
> 
>     $ git reset --hard HEAD^
>     HEAD is now at ce5cf6f Merge git://github.com/git-l10n/git-po
> 
> or often it is
> 
>     $ git reset --hard ko/master
>     HEAD is now at ce5cf6f Merge git://github.com/git-l10n/git-po
> 
> In either case, I know where I am resetting to, so "HEAD is now at"
> is a less than useful noise.  If it contained "HEAD was at ...", it
> may let me realize that I was still going to use the contents in
> some other way and quickly go back to it with another reset, with
> cut and paste or with HEAD@{1}.  In either case, showing the tip of
> what I just discarded seems to be a lot more useful information than
> what we are currently giving the users.
>

Unless you use a git aware prompt, it's always good to know where your HEAD is ;) Just think of:

git reset --hard HEAD^2 HEAD is now at ...

Oh, I meant HEAD~2 aka HEAD^^ ...

In that case, information about HEAD@{1} might be useful but is not necessary, unless you are leaving behind a detached HEAD.

Cheers, Michael