RE:

On Thu, 7 May 2009, Linus Torvalds wrote:

On Thu, 7 May 2009, david@lang.hm wrote:

quoted

what about a reset --hard? (is there any command that would force the files to
be re-written, no matter what git thinks is already there)

No, not "git reset --hard" either, I think. Git very much tries to avoid
rewriting files, and if you've told it that file contents are stable, it
will believe you.

In fact, I think people used CE_VALID explicitly for the missing parts of
"partial checkouts", so if we'd suddenly start writing files despite them
being marked as ok in the tree, I think we'd have broken that part.

(Although again - I'm not sure who would use CE_VALID and friends).

If you want to force everything to be rewritten, you should just remove
the index (or remove the specific entries in it if you want to do it just
to a particular file) and then do a "git checkout" to re-read and
re-populate the tree.

But I'm not really seeing why you want to do this. If you told git that it
shouldn't care about the working tree, why do you now want it do care?

to be able to manually recover from the case where someone did things that 
they weren't supposed to

removing the index and doing a checkout would be a reasonable thing to do 
(at least conceptually), I will admit that I don't remember ever seeing a 
command (or discussion of one) that would let me do that.