What's the point of saying "HEAD is now at ..."?

What's the point of saying "HEAD is now at ..."?

[Junio C Hamano]

I sometimes wonder what value the message is giving us.

For example, while reviewing a patch in my Emacs session, I may say

    | git am -s3c <RETURN>

which runs the command on the contents of the e-mail I am reading,
to apply the patch.  After that, I would go to a separate terminal
and do things like "git show -U20", etc.  Once I am done, I reset
the temporary commit away, and get this:

    $ git reset --hard HEAD^
    HEAD is now at ce5cf6f Merge git://github.com/git-l10n/git-po

or often it is

    $ git reset --hard ko/master
    HEAD is now at ce5cf6f Merge git://github.com/git-l10n/git-po

In either case, I know where I am resetting to, so "HEAD is now at"
is a less than useful noise.  If it contained "HEAD was at ...", it
may let me realize that I was still going to use the contents in
some other way and quickly go back to it with another reset, with
cut and paste or with HEAD@{1}.  In either case, showing the tip of
what I just discarded seems to be a lot more useful information than
what we are currently giving the users.

Re: What's the point of saying "HEAD is now at ..."?

[Michael J Gruber]

Junio C Hamano venit, vidit, dixit 14.09.2012 07:14:
> I sometimes wonder what value the message is giving us.
> 
> For example, while reviewing a patch in my Emacs session, I may say
> 
>     | git am -s3c <RETURN>
> 
> which runs the command on the contents of the e-mail I am reading,
> to apply the patch.  After that, I would go to a separate terminal
> and do things like "git show -U20", etc.  Once I am done, I reset
> the temporary commit away, and get this:
> 
>     $ git reset --hard HEAD^
>     HEAD is now at ce5cf6f Merge git://github.com/git-l10n/git-po
> 
> or often it is
> 
>     $ git reset --hard ko/master
>     HEAD is now at ce5cf6f Merge git://github.com/git-l10n/git-po
> 
> In either case, I know where I am resetting to, so "HEAD is now at"
> is a less than useful noise.  If it contained "HEAD was at ...", it
> may let me realize that I was still going to use the contents in
> some other way and quickly go back to it with another reset, with
> cut and paste or with HEAD@{1}.  In either case, showing the tip of
> what I just discarded seems to be a lot more useful information than
> what we are currently giving the users.
> 

Unless you use a git aware prompt, it's always good to know where your
HEAD is ;) Just think of:

git reset --hard HEAD^2
HEAD is now at ...

Oh, I meant HEAD~2 aka HEAD^^ ...

In that case, information about HEAD@{1} might be useful but is not
necessary, unless you are leaving behind a detached HEAD.

Cheers,
Michael