Dear Juno
Thanks for your answer.
My fair criticism in my previous emails (and below) is just to try to convince you that with a few short sentences you risk to transmit only vague ideas, while a serious user is interested to understand the behavior of git in any occurrence, with no ambiguity. Once more, in my view a short pseudo code -- or its equivalent in words -- would be a useful compromise among simplicity and accuracy.
I'm attacking git checkout but I guess that what I say is a general problem of the git official documentation (i.e git stash in my experience has problems).
Each undocumented feature (simulated by my dumb questions) enforces the loss of a significant percentage of the users.
Lacking details, a hurried user will not use the feature, or if they are brave enough, they will use it without understanding (i.e. risking data loss one day or the other)...
Lacking details, a serious user will have to waste their time in trials or in studing the sources.
Do not fear that giving details in a man page would scare newbyes: as a git newbye I can say that what scares me is the lack of information, not the complexity(=power) of a program (*)
Do not waste your precious time in explaining me/us general ideas, we can find them in the tens of pedagogic tutorials/books out there, please give us those details that nobody out there seems to know and that man (un)intentionally hides!
I would be happy to submit a patch for the man git-checkout but I'm not sure that my understanding of git checkout (as encoded in the pseudocode I submitted) is correct.
My friendly regards,
ric
(*) of course you're allowed to discard my suggestions pretending that I'm not a representative user ;)
On Friday 20 September 2013 15:58:27 Junio C Hamano wrote:
> The principle is that we allow you to check out a different branch
> when you have local changes to the working tree and/or to the index,
> as long as we can make the index and the working tree pretend as if
> you reached that locally modified state, starting from a clean state
> of the branch you are checking out.
Of course I understand the idea, but if I try to grasp the details I'm in trouble: the problem in this statement is the ambiguity of "change" and "pretend as".
In plain english I can start from any content and change it to any other content, so in this semantics your statement is empty, or worse.
If I assume that change means "differences with N lines of unchanged context" I must still guess differences with respect to what? head-index, index-work, head-work ???? ... and how much is N? 3, 4, 1028?
Then, in order to understand I (a user) make the trials below, and concludes that also the nice principle stated above is somewhat incomplete....
git-test15$ echo -e 'a\n1\n2\n3\n4\n5\nb\n6\n7\n8\n9\n10\n'>f; cat f;git init; git add f; git commit -a -m 'ab'; git checkout -b dev; echo -e 'A\n1\n2\n3\n4\n5\nb\n6\n7\n8\n9\n10\n'>f;cat f;git commit -a -m 'Ab'; echo -e 'A\n1\n2\n3\n4\n5\nB\n6\n7\n8\n9\n10\n'>f;cat f;git add f; git checkout master
a
1
2
3
4
5
b
6
7
8
9
10
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/git-test15/.git/
[master (root-commit) 46d19ab] ab
1 file changed, 13 insertions(+)
create mode 100644 f
Switched to a new branch 'dev'
A
1
2
3
4
5
b
6
7
8
9
10
[dev bb852db] Ab
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
A
1
2
3
4
5
B
6
7
8
9
10
error: Your local changes to the following files would be overwritten by checkout:
f
Please, commit your changes or stash them before you can switch branches.
Aborting
#####################################################################################
#### why abort the change w.r.t. dev was just b -> B and that patch was admissible in master ... I start questioning the principle ####
#####################################################################################
git-test15$ mkdir ../gittest16
git-test15$ cd ../gittest16
gittest16$ echo -e 'a\n1\n2\n3\n4\n5\nb\n6\n7\n8\n9\n10\n'>f; cat f;git init; git add f; git commit -a -m 'ab'; git checkout -b dev; echo -e 'A\n1\n2\n3\n4\n5\nb\n6\n7\n8\n9\n10\n'>f;cat f;git commit -a -m 'Ab'; echo -e 'a\n1\n2\n3\n4\n5\nB\n6\n7\n8\n9\n10\n'>f;cat f;git add f; git checkout master
a
1
2
3
4
5
b
6
7
8
9
10
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/gittest16/.git/
[master (root-commit) 7d7febe] ab
1 file changed, 13 insertions(+)
create mode 100644 f
Switched to a new branch 'dev'
A
1
2
3
4
5
b
6
7
8
9
10
[dev 143db1d] Ab
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
a
1
2
3
4
5
B
6
7
8
9
10
error: Your local changes to the following files would be overwritten by checkout:
f
Please, commit your changes or stash them before you can switch branches.
Aborting
gittest16$
#####################################################################################
#### why abort? the change w.r.t. master was just b -> B and that patch was admissible in master ... I start questioning the principle ####
#####################################################################################
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