Re: 'commit -a' safety (was: Re: Please default to 'commit -a' when no changes were added)

On Sat, 24 Apr 2010, Petr Baudis wrote:

On Sat, Apr 24, 2010 at 02:35:17PM -0400, Nicolas Pitre wrote:

quoted

In that case the deficiency is in the fact that no reflog preserves the 
intermediate state of the index, not the fact that you might be allowed 
to do it.  Strictly speaking there is no intermediate ref to log, but a 
synthetic commit could be created for this case just like a stash but 
stored in the current branch's reflog.

Possibly, but I don't see how is this better than the check - it is less
user friendly, most importantly because user that has not seen this
twice has no idea that anything *was* saved to a reflog.

Possibly.  But the fact that some data could be lost here is a flaw.  
The reflog is the safety net making sure that whatever the user does is 
not completely destructive.

Are there valid user scenarios where you customize your index, then want
to override that using -a without thinking twice?

Admittedly there aren't many.  And in those few hypothetical cases then 
requiring -f would be acceptable.


Nicolas