A safer git checkout

13 points by guybrush0 14 years ago | 18 comments

bherms 14 years ago |

Perhaps I'm missing something, but in years of development using git as our scm, I have never used checkout -f. I've used reset --hard HEAD here and there. Is there any difference in their use?

Also, are there a lot of developers who work for hours without committing? I've only found myself in a situation where I could possibly lose hours of work a few times and each time this happens I realize I was treading thin ice.

Lastly, and maybe this is also just me, I keep my repos in Dropbox. Github is our main repo store, but I've got an extra level of protection, especially since Dropbox allows you to rollback file changes.

ghurlman 14 years ago | |

I've worked with developers that went days without committing... it was maddening.

MBlume 14 years ago | | |

Can we all work on this? Somehow nobody seems to treat writing crappy commits (messages like "work since Tuesday" or "it works now") like they would writing crappy code. Version control is fundamental to our job.

MBlume 14 years ago | |

> Also, are there a lot of developers who work for hours without committing?

I manage maybe an hour at a max, and then have to make extensive use of commit -p to tease apart all the changes I've made.

billybob 14 years ago |

I've been using Git for a couple years now, and I don't think I've ever lost any work.

Even if you do `git reset --hard HEAD~5`, "throwing away" your last few commits, they aren't actually discarded yet. You can do `git reflog` to see them and then `git checkout -b some_commit_hash` to recover one to a branch, or `git reset --hard some_commit-hash` to set this branch back to that point.

Only if those commits stay orphaned for a while (a week or two?) will Git truly discard them.

Xurinos 14 years ago | |

It becomes dangerous if you have changes in your working tree. You truly lose those changes with a "git reset --hard HEAD" or the forced checkout.

davvid 14 years ago | | |

Exactly. As mentioned in the article, `git reset --keep` is the preferred way to do it these days. It preserves uncommitted worktree changes.

billybob 14 years ago | | |

Oh! I see. I would never do a `git reset` of any kind if I hadn't committed or stashed. Yikes!

shaggyfrog 14 years ago |

Dear author: the plural of alias is aliases.

cirwin 14 years ago | |

I know :). See https://github.com/ConradIrwin/git-aliae#faq.

lsb 14 years ago | | |

We make nouns out of adverbial/prepositional phrases often, and alias ("in other places [known as]" -> "a name by which one is known in another place") is just one example. We talk about items, but "item" is the adverb that means "also", and you'd find it in recipes: "2 eggs. Item: oil. Item: water.". (Less similarly, you'll see brochures called "take-ones".)

hyprlogik 14 years ago |

Why not just use git stash?

bnr 14 years ago |

I don't see how git-cof is different/better than git-stash.

cirwin 14 years ago | |

Git stash solves a different problem, which is "I want to save these changes, and get them back". git-cof is optimized for the use-case of "I want to get rid of these changes, and I'll probably never use them again".

The most obvious difference is that commits made with git-cof never show up in git log --oneline --graph; but also they get garbage collected automatically, you don't have to manually go through "git stash list".