Re: Untracked working tree files

On Wed, 15 Oct 2008, david@lang.hm 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.

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?

(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..)

			Linus