Re: three questions: proper forum? & reverting changes to the working directory

On Thu, 8 Nov 2012 08:26:22 -0600
"McKown, John" [off-list ref] wrote:

1) is this the proper forum for asking general git usage questions,
such as "how to"? If not, what is?

This list is okay for the general usage questions.
But since it's the place where the development questions are discussed
as well, and patches get posted, you might find its signal-to-noise
ratio to be not very convenient for a casual user.

For "mere mortals", we have another list, git-users, hosted on Google
Groups [1].  It deals only with problems Git newbies have with Git.

2) I am unsure that I did things the "proper" way. I have a git
maintained subdirectory. I made some changes and saved them in the
working directory, but did not "git add" or "git commit" them. I then
decided that I really messed up what I was doing (basically
reformatting some source code). So to revert the changes back to what
was last committed, I did a "git reset --hard HEAD". I think this is
the proper way. But I picked up that command in the section of the
documentation which was talking about abandoning a "git merge"
attempt. What I did worked, but is it the proper way? If not, what
is?

Yes, that was the proper way.  A failed Git merge attempt could be
considered as just another case of a messed-up state of the work tree
and the index.

You might want to read the "Reset Demystified" [2] document for a
friendly descriptions of how different ways to invoke `git reset`
affect the repository, the index and the work tree.

3) More generically, suppose I have a file in my working directory
that I want to put back the way it was "n" commits ago. The best that
I can see, so far, is "git show HEAD~n:file >|file", replacing the
"n" and "file" with appropriate values.

`git checkout` is able to fetch specific versions of the specified
files if called like this:

$ git checkout HEAD~n -- filename 

1. http://groups.google.com/group/git-users/
2. http://git-scm.com/2011/07/11/reset.html