Re: [PATCH v2 0/1] Make 'git commit' not accidentally lose staged content

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Mon, Sep 17, 2018 at 08:41:36PM +0200, Duy Nguyen wrote:

> > I think the reflog approach has been successful: give these intermediate
> > states a name. So in theory I could do something like:
> >
> >   git checkout -p :@{2.minutes.ago}
> >
> > though it would probably be useful to be able to walk the states, too,
> > just like we have "log --reflog-walk".
> >
> > The syntax above is off-the-cuff (and based on the ":<stage>" index
> > syntax). I guess if we had a separate log for "stuff in the worktree
> > that got thrown away by reset" we might need a separate syntax.
> 
> I'm leaning towards reflog too. Not because of the syntax but because
> of reusing the current code base. I don't have to worry about pruning,
> walking, gc-ing... because it's pretty much already there. And the UI
> is not so urgent since reflog file is very readable, early adopters
> can just open the file and get the hash.

Ah, good point on pruning/gc. I had imagined a new "index log" format.
But really if you just turn the result into a tree, then it becomes just
another ref(log). That might be slightly less efficient, but the
flexibility and simplicity are probably worth it. Or maybe with
cache-tree it is not even less efficient.

So that definitely seems like the right direction.

> I'm trying to quickly make something that writes to
> "$GIT_DIR/logs/index" and see how it goes. But yeah I'll probably drop
> this patch. The ":@{2.minutes.ago}" just makes me like this direction
> more, even though I don't know if I could even make that work.

I think "index@{2.minutes.ago}" would almost work, but it would probably
complain about a reflog without a matching ref. That seems like it would
be pretty easy to work around in the reflog code. Or maybe even by
having a stash-like "index log" ref.

-Peff