Subject: Re: [RFC] reset --hard: warn before discarding staged content with no commit history

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2025 08:27:12 +0900

Koutsouflakis Stefanos <[email-masked]> writes:

> On Friday, December 12th, 2025 at 05:25, Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]> wrote:
>
>> I doubt that special casing an empty tree would fly well.
>
> I might be missing something, could you say more about 
> what makes this problematic? 

Inconsistency.

Treating "newly added files" specifically is making the behaviour
inconsistent with others already, but doing so only when you haven't
created a commit or after doing "checkout/switch --orphan", which is
essentially what special-casing an empty tree case is about, makes
it even more inconsistent.

> If it is about breaking existing workflows: any script that 
> automates either of the two use-cases discussed would be relying 
> on behavior that is almost certainly unintended.

I do not think that is the reason for "special casing an empty tree
would not fly well", but I have to say your view is too narow.  I do
rely on "reset --hard && clean -f -x" working in order to make the
working tree spiffy clean, and I somehow doubt I am in the minority.
And "reset --hard" MUST not fail in such a case.

> Such scripts 
> would fail, but without data loss, and give authors a clear 
> signal to fix a likely bug. 

And most authors will consider the "bug" to be fixed is in the
degraded behaviour of "reset --hard". that does not do what is
written on the label  Then what?