Re: EasyGit Integration

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Thu, 11 Jun 2009, Felipe Contreras wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 7:03 AM, Linus
> Torvalds<torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
> >
> >
> > On Tue, 9 Jun 2009, Theodore Tso wrote:
> >>
> >> My personal opinion is this kind of overloading is actually more
> >> confusing than simply adding a new name, such as "git revert-file".
> >
> > I'd agree, except I think it actually worked pretty well in "git
> > checkout".
> >
> > The alternative was to add yet another command for that, or to teach
> > people about the internal commands we did have. Adding the capability for
> > checkout to check out individual files - in addition to commits and
> > branches - I think worked pretty well.
> 
> Why? What makes 'git checkout <commit>' and 'git checkout <commit> --
> <path>' similar at all? I would expect 'git checkout <commit>' to be
> the same as 'git checkout <commit> -- .'

You don't understand.

"git checkout" would be similar to "git revert", if we did that change. 

IOW, both would be "if you give it a commit, it acts at a commit level", 
and "if you give it pathnames, it acts on a pathname level".

That is totally obvious, and not in the least confusing. They are two 
different things, but at the same time, there is no question about which 
is which. 

> In my mind these are 2 completely different commands.

They are two different things, but they both make sense within the 
_context_.

Only earthworms and FOX news have no concept of "in context". So it does 
make sense to say "git checkout filename" (and expect it to check out that 
_filename_ - surprise surprise), and also say "git checkout branch" (and 
expect it to check out that branch - again, big surprise).

Humans are generally _very_ good at seeing the same word in two different 
contexts, and not being confused at all. There is no confusion when I talk 
about SCM's in the context of git, even though "SCM" could also mean a 
Sceme interpreter, or "Saskatchewan College of Midwives".

In fact, it is often *much* better to accept context-awareness, than to 
try too hard to be "uniquely identifying" even without context. 

Of course, you do want things to also be unambiguous. But that's why we 
have things like that "--" thing, when we want to specify pathspecs 
explicitly and don't want to accept any kind of ambiguity. Most humans 
tend to leave them out, and that "--" thing shows up mostly in git 
scripts.

			Linus