Re: [RFC/PATCH 1/2] reset: learn to reset to tree

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Martin von Zweigbergk <martinvonz@gmail.com> writes:

> More importantly, when is it desirable not to delete deleted entries?

When I am trying to check out contents of Documentation/ directory
as of an older edition because we made mistakes updating the files
in recent versions, with "git checkout v1.9.0 Documentation/", for
example.  Perhaps somebody had this bright idea of reformatting our
docs with "= Newer Style =" section headers, replacing the underline
style, and we found our toolchain depend on the underline style, or
something.  The new files in the same directory added since v1.9.0
may share the same mistake as the files whose recent such changes I
am nuking with this operation, but that does not mean I want to
retype the contents of them from scratch; I'd rather keep them
around so that I can fix them up by hand.

I would have to say that it is more common; I do not recall a time I
wanted to replace everything in a directory (and only there without
touching other parts of the tree) with an old version, removing new
ones.  "git checkout [$commit] $paths" is still an operation to help
me build new history forward starting from HEAD, and is not about
start building on top of the old $commit.  Losing the work I've done
to the files that did not exist in $commit:$paths is almost always
*not* what I would expect to happen with the command.