Re: [PATCH 0/2] read-tree: improve untracked file support

From: Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com>
To: Duy Nguyen <pclouds@gmail.com>,
	Phillip Wood <phillip.wood@dunelm.org.uk>
Cc: Git Mailing List <git@vger.kernel.org>,
	Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/2] read-tree: improve untracked file support
Date: Wed, 1 May 2019 15:58:28 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <d4c36a24-b40c-a6ca-7a05-572ab93a0101@gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CACsJy8CNUEBXmBcQnRHqdeFJtTvBuZ9thP7QPAw-ZOD+2ty3VA@mail.gmail.com>

On 01/05/2019 11:31, Duy Nguyen wrote:
> On Wed, May 1, 2019 at 5:14 PM Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> From: Phillip Wood <phillip.wood@dunelm.org.uk>
>>
>> These two patches teach read-tree how to avoid overwriting untracked
>> files when doing '--reset -u' and also how to respect all of git's
>> standard excludes files. I'd like to see the porcelain commands stop
>> overwriting untracked files, this is a first step on the way. I'm not
>> sure if we want to add options to the porcelain commands to protect
>> untracked files or just change their behavior and add an option to
>> override that. I'm leaning towards the latter but I'd be interested to
>> hear what others think.
> 
> For new commands like git-restore, it's definitely a good thing to not
> overwrite untracked files.

I agree, unfortunately this series does not help with git-restore, only 
git-switch. For restore on an index without conflicts I think it could 
just use the pathspec in struct unpack_trees_options and set opts.rest = 
UNPACK_RESET_PROTECT_UNTRACKED but that does not help if we want to 
handle conflicted paths differently to non-conflicted paths.

> For existing commands I guess we have to go
> over them one by one. For "git reset --hard", it should really just
> overwrite whatever needed to get back to the known good state. "git
> checkout -f" , not so sure (seems weird that we need force-level-two
> option to override the protection provided by -f, if we change default
> behavior)

I think it's fine for "checkout -f" to overwrite untracked files (and if 
"switch --discard-changes" does not then there is no pressing need to 
add such a mode to checkout), --force is a good name for an option that 
nukes everything that gets in it's way. For "reset --hard" I'm not so 
sure, if I have changes to an untracked file I don't wont them 
overwritten by default. There is no porcelain equivalent to "read-tree 
--reset --protect-untracked -u" and I was hoping "reset --hard" may 
become that porcelain equivalent with a new --force or 
--overwrite-untracked option.

For the various "foo --abort" some (most?) are using "reset --merge" 
which I think declines to overwrite untracked files but rebase uses 
"reset --hard" which I'd like to change to protect untracked files in 
the same way that rebase does for the initial checkout and when picking 
commits. I haven't thought about stash.

Best Wishes

Phillip