Elijah Newren <new...@gmail.com> writes: >> Note that 'git checkout -p <tree-ish> -- [<pathspec>]' already works >> this way, so no changes are needed for the patch mode. We disallow >> 'git checkout --overlay -p' to avoid confusing users who would expect >> to be able to force overlay mode in 'git checkout -p' this way. > > Whoa...that's interesting. To me, that argues even further that the > traditional checkout behavior was wrong all along and the choice of > --overlay vs. --no-overlay in the original implementation was a total > oversight. I'm really tempted to say that --no-overlay should just be > the default in checkout too...but maybe that's too high a hill to > climb, at least for now.
You are exhibiting a typical reaction to a shiny new toy. The original "checkout paths out of the trees and/or the index to recover what was lost" is modeled after "cp -R .../else/where .", which is an overlay operation, and you wouldn't imagine complaining that "cp -R" is wrong not to remove things in the target, to be equivalent to "rm -fr where && cp -R .../else/where .". Each has its own uses. We just didn't have the other half of the pair. If anything, I would consider "checkout -p" that does not do overlay is a bug that needs to be fixed.
