Thing DELETED 3 MONTHS OF WORK (2017)
github.com
github.com
While I think the user who failed to commit 5000 files is probably a bit to blame as well. We do need to acknowledge the the UI prompts are not always intuitive, and dangerous operation should have several safety mechanisms.
The UI prompt was: “Are you sure you want to discard ALL changes. This is IRREVERSIBLE.”
This, after the user wanted to stage their files for the first time. What does “changes” even mean in that context?
But also trying a new tool on 5k files that aren’t saved elsewhere isn’t advisable.
rubbish dev avoids vcs for months and then blames software that he told to remove all his files when the files were removed
karma's a biatch, and it looks, from this report, like it's been saving up for a while to get him real good :D
There's definitely a lot of anger in the report, but underlying that I think there's a valid UX issue in that "discard changes" does not adequately convey what the operation actually did.
In most contexts, "discard changes" just means the current changes not yet saved to disk. Even being familiar with git, I probably would've expected a `git reset` (reverting tracked files to last commit) opposed to deletion of files not being tracked by git. Latter seems hard to justify as "discarding changes" when those files may have existed, unchanged, since before the repo was initialized.
> karma's a biatch, and it looks, from this report, like it's been saving up for a while to get him real good :D
The dev hadn't done anything morally wrong to cause the incident, and I suspect they're relatively young - IMO, despite their rage-post, some empathy's a better response than just taking delight in their frustration. I'd worry that the lesson they come away with is more likely to be "git is dangerous and idiosyncratic" opposed to "I should've used git earlier".