Re: About detached heads

[Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org>]

On Sat, 15 Mar 2008, Geoff Russell wrote:

> The context where I want to use this is for users who update files,
> can understand
> "take me back to the state I was in at 4pm yesterday before I mucked up
> my data" but who don't want to know about merging, branching, topics, etc, etc,
> But of course having taken them back to the 4pm commit, they then realise that
> they really need the 6pm commit or perhaps the 3pm commit. So anything which
> just throws away commits would be risky.

The reflog can help you there as well.  You can simply do:

	git reset --hard HEAD@{yesterday.at.4pm}

and it'll magically bring you back to the state you were yesterday at 
4pm.  You need the 6pm state instead?  No problem: just ask for 
yesterday.at.6pm then.

And before doing the 'reset --hard', you might want to do a simple 
'checkout' beforehand so you can be sure it actually corresponds to what 
you want:

	git checkout HEAD@{yesterday.at.4pm}
	[compile, test, whatever]
	git checkout HEAD@{yesterday.at.6pm}
	[compile, test, whatever]

and when OK with it, then:

	# return to your master branch (or any other branch)
	git checkout master
	# then reset it to the desired state
	git reset --hard HEAD@{yesterday.at.6pm}


Nicolas