Subject: Re: Feature request: Allow extracting revisions into directories

From: Tomas Carnecky <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 04 Feb 2013 12:47:45 +0000

On Mon, 04 Feb 2013 13:14:05 +0100, Robert Clausecker <[email-masked]> wrote:
> Of course that is a possibility but it does not not feel right and is
> not intuitive. Adding this feature won't cause feature creep but would
> rather add an operation that makes sense in some scenarios and reduces
> the dependencies on other commands that might not be available on other
> platforms (If you care about that).

I'd really like to see your reply to Sitaram's email regarding the many
options that tar has. Sure, just teaching git-archive the equivalent of `|tar
-x' probably isn't feature creep. But why stop there and not add some of the
other options as well? After all, some might be equally useful in a different
situation. So where do you stop? When you've completely merged tar into git?

> Also, this functionality is in full accordance with the Unix principle
> as it is a basic operation ("put tree into files") and not something
> super special.

That's what `git checkout` is for. And I would even argue that it's the better
choice in your situation because it would delete files from /var/www/foo which
you have deleted in your repo. git archive|tar wouldn't do that.