Re: [PATCH] Documentation: add a planning document for the next CLI revamp

On Thu, 2008-10-30 at 10:39 -0400, Theodore Tso wrote:

* Add the command "git revert-file <files>" which is syntactic sugar for:

        git checkout HEAD -- <files>

  Rationale: Many other SCM's have a way of undoing local edits to a
  file very simply, i.e."hg revert <file>" or "svn revert <file>", and
  for many developers's workflow, it's useful to be able to undo local
  edits to a single file, but not to everything else in the working
  directory.  And "git checkout HEAD -- <file>" is rather cumbersome
  to type, and many beginning users don't find it intuitive to look in
  the "git-checkout" man page for instructions on how to revert a
  local file.

Well, I don't have strong feelings on the exact command name used; I
suggested "undo", probably also ambiguous.  But still, a significant
number of users are surprised when they type 'git revert' and they get a
backed out patch.  It's such an uncommon operation, it doesn't deserve
to be triggered so easily.  And reverting files to the state in the
index and/or HEAD is a common operation that deserves being short to
type.

Making it plain "revert" would violate expectations of existing users;
it seems a better idea to just deprecate it, and point the users to the
new method - cherry-pick --revert - or the command they might have meant
- whatever that becomes.

Sam.