Re: EasyGit Integration

[Sam Vilain <sam@vilain.net>]

Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Tue, 9 Jun 2009, Scott Chacon wrote:
>   
>> * breaks the various things that 'checkout' does into separate
>> commands - moves 'revert' to doing what 'checkout -- path' does
>>     
>
> No.
>
> NAK on this one. 
>
> The fact that some idiotic SVN usage exists is not an excuse to break 
> long-standing git users. "revert" comes from bk, and quite frankly, I 
> object _very_ strongly to taking naming from something that is very 
> obviously the inferior system (SVN) over something very obviously superior 
> (BK and git).
>   

We talked about this much at GitTogether '08. It's true that for
'reverting' a change in the past, that is the right thing to do. However
I don't think there is a first principles case that this is always what
people mean by 'revert'. And it is not just SVN - Mercurial, Monotone,
Bazaar, Darcs all use 'revert' in this way. By comparison with those
systems, the number of users coming from BK is quite low.

We talked about making a 'git revert-file' and 'git revert-commit', with
'git revert' printing a message encouraging the user to specify which
one they wanted (or potentially pointing them to the correct
incantations of 'git checkout' or 'git cherry-pick').

I think as long as there is a deprecation cycle, and that users can
select the old behaviour (either via an alias or a config option), then
we shouldn't upset many long-time users of revert. Do you agree?

Sam.