Re: several quick questions

On Tue, 14 Feb 2006 09:05:16 -0800 (PST), Linus Torvalds wrote:

Both of these can be solved with "git reset".

...

 - "git branch". This creates a new branch of development at an arbitrary 
   point (that defaults to "current state").

 - "git checkout". This switches to another branch.

 - "git reset". This will reset the current branch state to something 
   else.

Thanks for the summary.

I don't know if it's the original poster's question or not, but an
operation I don't see in the above is "put the working files into the
state of a given revision".

I recently needed this for some historical investigation,
(specifically examining all release tags to ensure that the results
after a git import match the results of what we get from the former
CVS repository).

In this kind of historical exploration, the notion of a "current
branch" isn't interesting, since I won't be doing any commits. So the
handling of the current branch in the above commands ends up getting
in my way [*].

Is there a more fundamental operation to "put the working files into
the state of the index"? If that exists, then that combined with
git-read-tree would give me what I wanted I think.

-Carl

[*] I did succeed in performing the operation, but only in rather
awkward ways. Here are a couple of versions of "put the working files
into the state of <revision>", both requiring the use of an otherwise
unnecessary branch, (bogus-branch):

1) Ensure bogus-branch doesn't exist, then create it at <revision>:

	# Can't be on bogus-branch when we delete it
	git checkout master
	# Use -D to force the removal, ignore errors for branch-does-not-exist
	git branch -D bogus-branch >& /dev/null || true
	# Create the branch where we want it
	git checkout -b bogus-branch <revision>

2) Ensure that bogus-branch exists somewhere (don't care where), then
   move it:

	# Create the branch (if it doesn't exist)
	git checkout -b bogus-branch >& /dev/null
	# Switch to it (which doesn't happen above if it already existed)
	git checkout bogus-branch
	# Move the branch to the revision of interest
	git reset --hard <revision>