Re: EasyGit Integration

On Thu, 11 Jun 2009, Felipe Contreras wrote:

On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 7:03 AM, Linus
Torvalds[off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On Tue, 9 Jun 2009, Theodore Tso wrote:

quoted

My personal opinion is this kind of overloading is actually more
confusing than simply adding a new name, such as "git revert-file".

I'd agree, except I think it actually worked pretty well in "git
checkout".

The alternative was to add yet another command for that, or to teach
people about the internal commands we did have. Adding the capability for
checkout to check out individual files - in addition to commits and
branches - I think worked pretty well.

Why? What makes 'git checkout <commit>' and 'git checkout <commit> --
<path>' similar at all? I would expect 'git checkout <commit>' to be
the same as 'git checkout <commit> -- .'

You don't understand.

"git checkout" would be similar to "git revert", if we did that change. 

IOW, both would be "if you give it a commit, it acts at a commit level", 
and "if you give it pathnames, it acts on a pathname level".

That is totally obvious, and not in the least confusing. They are two 
different things, but at the same time, there is no question about which 
is which. 

In my mind these are 2 completely different commands.

They are two different things, but they both make sense within the 
_context_.

Only earthworms and FOX news have no concept of "in context". So it does 
make sense to say "git checkout filename" (and expect it to check out that 
_filename_ - surprise surprise), and also say "git checkout branch" (and 
expect it to check out that branch - again, big surprise).

Humans are generally _very_ good at seeing the same word in two different 
contexts, and not being confused at all. There is no confusion when I talk 
about SCM's in the context of git, even though "SCM" could also mean a 
Sceme interpreter, or "Saskatchewan College of Midwives".

In fact, it is often *much* better to accept context-awareness, than to 
try too hard to be "uniquely identifying" even without context. 

Of course, you do want things to also be unambiguous. But that's why we 
have things like that "--" thing, when we want to specify pathspecs 
explicitly and don't want to accept any kind of ambiguity. Most humans 
tend to leave them out, and that "--" thing shows up mostly in git 
scripts.

			Linus