Re: Proposal: create meaningful aliases for git reset's hard/soft/mixed

[Matthieu Moy <Matthieu.Moy@grenoble-inp.fr>]

Philippe Vaucher <philippe.vaucher@gmail.com> writes:

> A lot of time when I want to use reset for smth else than "--hard" I
> have to go and look the documentation.

I have to agree with this, I took a lot of time to understand/memorize
the meaning of reset options.

> Optional: a new mode would be introduced for consistency:
> --worktree (or maybe --tree): only updates the worktree but not the index

That would be an alias for "git checkout <rev> -- path", right?

I don't really like this "there is more than one way to do it" in Git's
command-line, I think we should think very carefully before introducing
yet another instance of it.

> --keep could be removed in favor of an additional --safe flag

If you are to change the option names, then you should also make the
behavior safe by default:

* "git reset --all" = "git reset --keep"
* "git reset --all --force" = "git reset --hard"

With the current terminology, --hard has the advantage that it makes it
realatively clear how dangerous it is. Still, I've seen users losing
data because they did a "git reset --hard" with uncommited changes. Git
is safe by default most of the time, and "git reset --hard" is one
unfortunate exception (because it was there before --keep, people are
more used to it).

"git reset --all" would make it worse, because the option name is less
scary, people would be less reluctant to use it, and would get more
chance to lose data.

-- 
Matthieu Moy
http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~moy/