Re: [PATCH 0/1] Allow the 'revert' option in Git Gui to operate on untracked files, deleting them

[Jonathan Gilbert <logic@deltaq.org>]

> Is there a reason these new files can't be ignored, with one of the.gitignore file, .git/info/exclude, or core.excludesFile?

I guess it's implied in the way I worded the message, but I have
fallen into the habit of using Git-Gui to manage the state of the
working copy (at least in detail). I am primarily doing .NET
development, for which projects can have a file App.config that stores
various settings that apply to the project at runtime. The NuGet
package manager sometimes edits App.config on your behalf as part of
installing a package, and if a project doesn't already have an
App.config file, it adds one. It has also updated a packages.config
file and the main project file. If I decide that I actually don't want
the change after all, Git-Gui permits me to revert the packages.config
change and revert the project file change. If an existing App.config
file was edited, I can revert that too, but if it was newly-generated,
then I want to delete that file, but I don't want to ignore App.config
files going forward, because there's a good chance a future change may
introduce a different need for an App.config file.

With the current Git-Gui version, I need to exit the Git-Gui UI/flow,
navigate to the project in a console window (which probably isn't
already in the correct folder) and manually delete the unwanted file.
This deletion requires me to identify the file explicitly as well.
With the proposed change, the untracked file, which Git-Gui already
lists, can be selected, and then activating the "revert" function
performs a UI flow for deleting the file. Without these changes,
Git-Gui simply does nothing at all when you tell it to revert an
untracked file.

Another example is when I go to review changes and discover a VIM
crash dump or a spurious temporary file from a code analyzer, files
that aren't _expected_ to normally come into existence at all. While
we could try to anticipate every type of spurious file and .gitignore
them all, I prefer to simply delete the files, and for similar reasons
as before, navigating a separate tool to the correct folder to perform
the deletion is a manual, time-consuming and context-switching
process. This is what led me to want this feature directly from the
Git-Gui tool, which is what identifies the rogue file to me in the
first place.

If you can think of a concise way to say that, I'll be happy to add it
to the commit message. My intuition is that that's too wordy
as-written, but if that intuition is wrong, I can copy/paste this text
too. :-)

Thanks,

Jonathan Gilbert


On Mon, Oct 28, 2019 at 7:12 PM brian m. carlson
sandals-at-crustytoothpaste.net |GitHub Public/Example Allow|
<92ue75mvem3o2ht@sneakemail.com> wrote:
>
> On 2019-10-28 at 18:58:06, Jonathan Gilbert via GitGitGadget wrote:
> > My development environment sometimes makes automatic changes that I don't
> > want to keep. In some cases, this involves new files being added that I
> > don't want to commit or keep. I have typically had to explicitly delete
> > those files externally to Git Gui, and I want to be able to just select
> > those newly-created untracked files and "revert" them into oblivion.
>
> Is there a reason these new files can't be ignored, with one of the
> .gitignore file, .git/info/exclude, or core.excludesFile?
>
> If so, it would be helpful to explain that in the commit message so we
> can more fully understand the rationale here.
> --
> brian m. carlson: Houston, Texas, US
> OpenPGP: https://keybase.io/bk2204