On Wednesday 2006 November 01 23:39, Junio C Hamano wrote: > That is not something other git commands with pathspec does. > Path limiters tell command to "do your thing only for paths that > match these patterns, while you usually handle all paths; your > behaviour shall otherwise not be any different in other aspects > between the case you got no limiter and the case you got _all_ > paths as limiters." So I do not think making path-only mode and > pathless mode behave differently is a good idea from the UI > point of view. Surely if you move HEAD you have implicitly affected every path? In which case what effect did the path limiter have? Given x --- y --- (z--Z) With z being the index and Z being the working directory - both uncommitted. The file foo will be different in x, y, z, and Z. We decide that z-foo is incorrect and that it was right in x; however, there are changes in Z-foo that we want to keep. git-reset --mixed HEAD^ foo This would reset z-foo (because --mixed) to its state in HEAD^; i.e. x-foo. If HEAD changes as well then all the rest of y will be lost - not just y-foo. Remember the original problem was a way of selectively manipulating the index without altering the working directory. I'm perfectly happy if git-reset is not the place to do this, because git-reset is only allowed to fiddle with HEAD/index; I moved to git-reset only because you mentioned that "reset historically is _not_ HEAD manipulator". I think we're back to square one: there is no appropriate command to take on this functionality: git-ls-tree HEAD^ foo | git-update-index --index-info * git-reset can't have it because it makes no sense to alter HEAD /and/ revert a file. It also occurs to me that "git-reset --hard HEAD^ foo" (using my suggested git-reset implementation) would be redundant anyway because it's the same as "git-checkout -f HEAD^ foo". * git-checkout can't have it because it doesn't target the index. * git-update-index can't have it because it is plumbing and doesn't know about commits, only about objects. I'm stumped now. Andy -- Dr Andy Parkins, M Eng (hons), MIEE andyparkins@xxxxxxxxx - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html