Re: [PATCH v3 7/8] checkout: introduce --{,no-}overlay option

Thomas Gummerer wrote:

On 01/22, Jonathan Nieder wrote:

quoted

I had no idea what --overlay would mean and am still not clear on it.
Is this analogous to "git add --ignore-removal"?  If so, can we just
call it --ignore-removal?

Yes, it seems like they are very similar.  I'm happy to rename the
option.  The topic seems to have made it to 'next' already, so I'll
submit the patches on top, unless reverting the topic out of next and
replacing it is preferred?

A patch on top sounds good.

[...]

quoted

I'm nervous about the config with no associated warning or plan for
phasing it out.  It means that scripts using "git checkout" don't
get a consistent behavior unless they explicitly pass this option,
which didn't exist in older versions of Git --- in other words,
scripts have no real good option.  Can we plan a transition to
making --no-ignore-removal the default, in multiple steps?  For
example:

As Junio mentioned, the plan was to just have this mode default when
we introduce the new checkout-paths command.

As checkout is a porcelain command, I had hoped it would be okay to
also have this as a configuration option, for the time before
'checkout-paths' exists and while I'm getting used to actually typing
'checkout-paths' instead of 'checkout'.  However I get that there may
be scripts that are using git checkout, and expect the previous
behaviour, so I'm also okay with dropping the config option for now.

Yes, if we have no plan for flipping the default later, then I would
prefer to eliminate the config option.  Scripts very frequently use
human-facing commands like "git checkout" when they want the command
to produce (unparsable) friendly output to show to humans, and I don't
think we've provided a good alternative for that use case.

If we still want to make this the default even after 'checkout-paths'
exists, the plan you outline below sounds good to me, though maybe we
can make the "flip the default" step once we decide to release git
3.0.

I would really like this, so I might write a series for it.  Please
don't wait for me, though --- feel free to send any patches you're
thinking about and we can work together or I can just appreciate your
work. ;-)

Sincerely,
Jonathan