Thanks a lot, that makes perfect sense! Thanks to Elijah we may also have discovered why the idea of precious files didn't get implemented last time it came up: it's too much work to make all portions of the code aware. I don't know if this time will be different as I can only offer to implement the syntax adjustment, whatever that might be (possibly after validating the candidate against a corpus of repositories), along with the update to `git clean` so it leaves precious files alone by default and a new flag to also remove precious files. Maybe that already is something worth having, but I can also imagine that ideally there is a plan for retrofitting other portions of git as well along with the resources to actually do it. On 15 Oct 2023, at 18:31, Junio C Hamano wrote: > Sebastian Thiel <sebastian.thiel@xxxxxxxxxx> writes: > >> A particularly interesting question brought up here also was the question >> of what's more important: untracked files, or precious files? Are they >> effectively treated the same, or is there a difference? > > Think of it this way. There are two orthogonal axes. > > (1) Are you a candidate to be tracked, even though you are not > tracked right now? > > (2) Should you be kept and make an operation fail that wants to > remove you to make room? > > For untracked files, both are "Yes". As we already saw in the long > discussion, precious files are "not to be added and not to be > clobbered", so you'd answer "No" and "Yes" [*]. > > In other words, both are equally protected from getting cloberred. > > Side note: for completeness, for ignored files, the answers are > "No", and "No". The introduction of "precious" class makes a > combination "No-Yes" that hasn't been possible so far. > > Elijah, thanks for doing a very good job of creating a catalog of > kludges we accumulated over the years for the lack of proper support > for the precious paths. I think they should be kept for backward > compatibility, but for new users they should not have to learn any > of them once we have the support for precious paths.
