Re: [PATCH v2 6/7] checkout: split into switch-branch and checkout-files

[Stefan Xenos <sxenos@google.com>]

>
> Which brings us back to your "git checkout-files <tree-ish>" use case
> above. It should be treat the same way in my opinion, so we either do
>
>  git checkout-files --from=tree-ish :/
>
> or
>
>  git checkout-files --from=tree-ish .
>
> But "git checkout-files --from=tree-ish" alone is rejected.

Agreed. Those arguments are better. The gist of my comment was the
treatment of newly created local files rather than the form of the
arguments, but it sounds like you've got that under control, too.

> > Suggestion:
> > If git checkout-files overwrites or deletes any locally-modified files
> > from the workspace or index, those files could be auto-stashed. That
> > would make it easy to restore them in the event of a mistyped command.
> > Auto-stashing could be suppressed with a command-line argument (with
> > alternate behaviors being fail-if-modified or always-overwrite).
>
> Stashing I think is not the right tool for this. When you stash, you
> plan to retrieve it back later but here you should rarely ever need to
> unstash until the accident. For recovery from accidents like this, I
> have another thing in queue to achieve the same (I'm calling it
> "backup log" now). So we will have the same functionality, just with
> different means.

Yes, this makes sense too. You wouldn't want to pollute the stash list
with autogenerated things the user probably doesn't want.

> This one is tricky because we should deal with submodule autoupdate
> consistently across all porcelain commands (or at least common ones),
> not just checkout-files.

This is also a good point. I'd like it if submodules just behaved like
a single giant repository for most commands, but you're right that
this is something that should be done intentionally for all the
commands at one rather than just for a single command.

I also like your new names "switch-branch" and "restore-files".