Duy Nguyen wrote: > On Mon, Apr 1, 2013 at 11:48 AM, Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> I'm afraid I can't imagine when --no-respect-skip-worktree would be >> useful. That can easily be a failure of my imagination, though. > > There may be scripts that expect "git checkout -- foo" to reset > everything in "foo". Or maybe you just want to check out a single file > and do not bother to edit sparse patterns as you won't need it for > long. Those scripts are bringing suffering on themselves by using porcelain instead of "git checkout-index". The usual way to look at a single file from the index is "git show :git.c >git.c". So you've convinced me. I think --respect-skip-worktree can be just the normal behavior (and that there's no need for a --no-respect option). That would let me do: git clone --no-checkout git://repo.or.cz/git.git cd git echo '/Documentation/' >.git/info/sparse-checkout git config core.sparsecheckout true git checkout printf '%s\n' /README /INSTALL /COPYING >>.git/info/sparse-checkout git checkout ... hack hack hack ... # return to what the index has git checkout . without having to see any pesky actual source (*.c) files. -- 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