From: "Junio C Hamano" <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> Sent: Tuesday, April 18, 2017
1:31 AM
"Philip Oakley" <philipoakley@xxxxxxx> writes:
If we'd created and added a file d just before the checkout, what
should
have happened to d, and why?
I understand what the command does. It behaves perfectly as I expected
it to. I did not find this script but wrote it to demonstrate that what
the documentation says is different from how it behaves after having
read what the documentation says it should do and noticing that that's
not how I expected it to work from experience.
What it really does is to copy all files described by the given paths
from the given tree-ish to the working directory. Or at least that's my
expectation of what it does.
The documentation, however, says that the given paths are *restored*.
This is different.
I don't see that difference in the phrase *restored*, compared to your
'copy all files described by the given paths'. Could you explain a
little more?
I am obviously not Christoph, and I was the one that defined how
"checkout <tree> -- <pathspec>" should work, but when you say
"restore" (which is not what I wrote ;-)) it is fair to expect lack
of 'd' could also be "restored", in addition to path that was in the
directory.
Obviously, "grab all paths that match <pathspec> out of <tree>, add
them to the index and copy them out to the working tree" will never
be able to _restore_ the lack of 'd', even it may match the
<pathspec> being used to do this checkout, by removing it from the
current index and the working tree.
My attempt at asking about an additional file 'd' ended up being a bit of a
red herring as it went off at a tangent.
Hopefully Christoph will hang in to help clarify the original issue. I think
I'm getting a sense of the potential confusion between the different
messages Git sends out, and which one is the right one here. On the one hand
Git promotes the two step staging area approach, but on the other hand the
checkout of a file suggests IIUC that all checkouts will end up as staged
revisions (one step only).
Philip