On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 03:14:39PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote: > Yeah, then I agree that "git checkout HEAD^ -- subdir" should be a > one-way "go HEAD^" merge limited only to the paths that match > subdir/. > > If implemented in a straight-forward way, I suspect that we may end > up not removing subdir/b in Uwe's sample transcript. I am not sure > if that is a good thing or not, though. If the index originally > tracked and then "going to" tree does not, I think removing it would > match "ignore local modifications" rule, as subdir/a that is tracked > in the index and also in "going to" tree does get overwritten to > match the state recorded in the tree. I had assumed the goal was to subdir/b (by the reasoning above, and the "rm -rf && tar" analogy you gave earlier). I tried a very hacky attempt at shoving unpack-trees into the right spot in checkout_paths. But its pathspec handling from unpack_trees is not quite what we want. In Uwe's case, it did delete subdir/b and overwrite subdir/a, which I'd expect. But if there was an additional file outside of subdir, it got deleted, too. The problem is that I was giving the regular index to unpack_trees as the destination; so it wrote out only the bits of the index under the pathspec subdir/, and omitted the rest entirely. I had hoped instead it would leave those parts untouched from the source. An alternative would be to write the new entries to a temporary index in memory. And then you can throw away the entries in the current index that match the pathspec, and add in the entries from the temporary index. I was just hoping that unpack-trees would do all of that for me. :) At this point, I'm giving up for now. I was hoping a naive application of unpack-trees would just work (and reduce the code size to boot), but it is obviously a bit more complicated than that. I still think it's a good idea for checkout to behave as Uwe described, but I don't think it's that high a priority, and I have other stuff I'd prefer to work on at the moment. -Peff -- 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