On Wed, 15 Oct 2008 12:31:40 -0700 (PDT) Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > On Wed, 15 Oct 2008, david@xxxxxxx wrote: > > > > the fact that git will happily leave modified things in the working directory > > appears to be very helpful for some developers, but it's also a big land mine > > for others. > > Hmm. It doesn't actually do that normally. If you switch between trees, > git will (or _should_) remove the old files that it knows about. If you > get a lot of left-over turds, there's something wrong. > > It could be a git bug, of course. That said, especially considering the > source of this, I wonder if it's just that Andrew ends up using all those > non-git scripts on top of a git tree, and then that can result in git > *not* knowing about a certain file, and then when switching between trees > (with either git checkout or with git reset), the data that was created > with non-git tools gets left behind and now git will be afraid to > overwrite it. I treat my git directory as a read-only thing. I only ever modify it with git commands. > So yes, there are ways to force it (both "git checkout -f" and "git reset > --hard" having already been mentioned), but the need for that - especially > if it's common - is a bit discouraging. > > Especially since it's still possible that it's some particular mode of git > usage that leaves those things around. Andrew - have you any clue what it > is that triggers the behavior? Sorry, no, I haven't seen a pattern. > (By the filename, I realize it's a file that doesn't exist in one tree or > the other, and which doesn't get removed at some point. But have you had > merge failures, for example? Is it perhaps a file that was created during > a non-clean merge, and then got left behind due to the merge being > aborted? It would be interesting to know what led up to this..) That's certainly a possibility - I get a lot of merge failures. A real lot. And then quite a bit of rebasing goes on, especially in linux-next. And then there's all the other stuff which Stephen does on top of the underlying trees to get something releasable happening. -- 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
