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Comment by mehrdadn | Hacker News Reader

> What you did there is the equivalent to a `revert` in SVN ... I'm not sure what the issue is? Why would you checkout `widget` and not expect local changes to be overwritten? Like, that checkout reverts is one of the first things you learn with git ...

Why would you sudo rm -rf / and not expect to destroy your system? Why is --preserve-root the default when that's clearly not what the command means? Like, that -rf wipes everything recursively is one of the first things you learn with rm...

Also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19907882

(P.S. also note the question wasn't even about whether this is expected behavior, it was just about whether it's possible to lose information when using git.)

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> Why would you sudo rm -rf /

Come now, that's being a bit hysterical/hyperbolic. There's plenty of other things you could do in the course of your command-line activities that are at least as destructive.

I know your example is meant to be trivial but there are plenty of ways when you're mucking about with pipes to ruin your day.

Like I say, "it is known" that git checkout is destructive, and while I can sympathise that perhaps the "-rf" is implicit I honestly can't see how you'd end up doing something like that in day-to-day activities, and if you did ... well if you'd spent any significant amount of time on it it probably should have been checked in anyway.

EDIT if you want to see some "good" examples of how you can inadvertently trash everything take a look at https://svnvsgit.com/ (warning, not as impartial as the title might suggest).

I'm not being hyperbolic or giving a trivial example (whatever that's supposed to mean), I was completely seriously pointing out that people used to apply your exact same victim-blaming logic to that same scenario until others finally made them come to their senses and realize that, just because the user happens to type in a command that tells the computer to shoot him in the face, that doesn't necessarily mean the computer should actually go ahead and shoot him in the face. Somehow you managed to take those 6 words out of context and focus on bashing the example while ignoring the actual real problem I was illustrating with it in your reasoning.

A "trivial example" is where you demonstrate a concept using a simplified or trivial scenario. It's quite a common term, and I didn't mean it as a put-down.

"victime-blaming", "shoot in the face" .. I feel are fairly extreme terms to describe what's happening here. The scenario you've concocted is really only one that could occur where you didn't know what you were doing and Git (or the command line) aren't really things you'd end up using if you didn't know what you're doing.

It's not a concocted scenario, the cli command in question explicitly has a property that defaults to preventing it from doing what it should do, unless you override the property. Explicitly because it's so destructive when you do it by mistake.

it's concocted because that's something you'd never do.

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