If the files were already staged then git should have blobs in the git folder, so they should be recoverable.
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had no business anywhere near a project that size.
Lol. That’s a really good point, actually.
I add version control around file number 3200…
(I’m kidding. Writing even a couple lines without version control makes my eye twitch.)
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Yeah. Same here. We learned to mistrust computers very early.
Did you read the thread? There was a bug that deleted all files even ones unassociated with git.
Looks like they weren’t staged. He clicked on the staging option, it showed it would stage thousands of files, he said “hey I should fix my .gitignore” and clicked on what looked like either a “don’t stage” or a “forget” button, and it was a “checkout --force” button.
The most impressive thing is all the people doubling down on the idea that a “checkout --force” button in a main interaction screen is a great idea, there’s nothing wrong with the software, and the user is a moron.
“discard changes” button - the 5000 “new file created” changes, specifically.
Poor guy basically did a git reset —hard HEAD without even a git repository
Even reset hard wouldn’t delete untracked files. This was a complete overreach by the GUI, performing a
clean(and likely a forced one, as git’s requireForce defaults to true).And they did rectify that eventually, giving a warning, and an option to simply reset. It’s unfortunate this poor person had to be the trigger for that change.
WORSE! If you read the thread and linked issue, it was closer to a
clean.
PEBKAC
The real issue is already going 3 months without source control.
The person didn’t have any git repository; probably a new programmer that didn’t know how version control works and just clicked discard without understanding what that means in this situation
I have heard things from another apprentice who just does not use version control at all and the only copies are on his laptop and on his desktop. He is also using node.js with only 1 class and doesn’t know about OOP (not sure if you even use that in js no clue 😅) and has one big file with 20k lines of code I have absolutely no clue how he navigates through it
Ey! Reminds me of my middle-school years! I still can’t belive I made an entire game without a single class… Just storing info in arrays and writing in comments what location represents what data. But I was a literal child, too young to read guides or sit through “long” tutorials.
I don’t want to sound too mean, but whenever I see anything similar at work, I wish that person get a job they’re actually good at. It’s fine and all that the company started hiring actual programmers to fix things, but the fact that the old crew still fucks shit up with senior privileges is a major grievance.
He just heard monoliths were in again
I know the type. Usually the kind of confident know-it-all who refuses to learn anything but delivers changes really quickly so management loves them. I had the misfortune to fix such a project after that ‘rock-star’ programmer left the company. Unfortunately the lack of professional standards in our industry allows people like that to continuously fail upwards. When I left the project they rehired them and let them design the v2 of the project we just fixed.
My company for the longest time had two engineers they would give all the new projects to. They would rush through some prototype code as fast as they could then management would bring in a new team to take the project over. The code was always garbage and crammed into one place. I kept getting new projects and instead of starting from a nice clean slate we always had to build on that garbage. It sucked so bad.
We really need some kind of board like the one that controls the title for engineers.
When I left the project they rehired them and let them design the v2 of the project we just fixed.
Lol. Wow.
And that is why I’ve been unable to work myself out of a job in all my long years as a developer.
Jesus, reminds me of a similar story. My gf once lost a job to someone who literally just pasted code into LLMs, also delivering quickly, even tho it was hot garbage. Anyhow, she spent a lot of her time fixing his shit and so her output went down. I hope that company burns to the ground with completely un manageable software.
Reading this just give me a panic attack
Those are rookie numbers. I have at least a 35k one somewhere. More than one actually.
People run their businesses on this.
I once landed a job at a small company doing a software for medical analysis labs all over the country. Software had been around for over ten years at this point. They had no source control. Nothing. Absolute nightmare.
They were literally starting to use source control when I arrived.
In 2015.The “source control” when I first started was all the code on a shared drive, to check out a file you copied it to your machine, and renamed the extension on the shared drive to your initials.
When somebody edited without doing this there would be full blown meltdowns over lost work.
I always found Git GUIs, especially the ones built into IDEs, to be more confusing and clunkier than working with Git on a terminal. It often feels like unlearning what one knows about Git, and relearning it the way that specific GUI demands.
Heck, I am going through the aforementioned feeling as I force myself to use Magit on Emacs. It just does not feel intuitive. But I will not give up until I have made an honest and full attempt.
The only sensible Git GUI I ever used is Sublime Merge[0], after a coworker praised it immensely. Even that is reserved for the rarest of the rare times when the changes in the workspace gets unwieldy and unruly. For every other instance: Git CLI on a terminal.
[0] https://www.sublimemerge.com/
E: typo, and link to mentioned GUI.
JetBrains has really nice Git integration. Interactive rebaseses and merges are quite pleasant but I’m still dipping into the command line to do stuff occasionally. Most commonly a
git reset HEAD~cause I want to split a commit though I had to dig through the reflog the other day cause I suddenly realized I lost an important branch that ended up being over a hundred commits back.How do you view diffs and merges when you say you don’t use git GUIs? External tool or terminal/command line?
I use Jetbrains IDEs and most of my life has been IDE based git interaction. And I honestly love it, easy access to see my diffs, the most common commit, push and stage(or shelve as Jetbrains does it, which is better than visual studio). Hassle free and available beats writing anything to me.
How do you view diffs and merges when you say you don’t use git GUIs? External tool or terminal/command line?
Terminal.
I use Jetbrains IDEs and most of my life has been IDE based git interaction. And I honestly love it, easy access to see my diffs, the most common commit, push and stage(or shelve as Jetbrains does it, which is better than visual studio). Hassle free and available beats writing anything to me.
Perhaps, it is a mix of learned behaviour and cognitive fixation, as I started out my development journey predominantly using a terminal, that I cannot fathom Git GUI being hassle free.
Nice to read a different perspective on such a fundamental thing that I take for granted while working. Thank you for sharing it.
Say you don’t know how to use git without saying you don’t know how to use git.
Git doesn’t automatically recursively add all files in the directory to the repository though - VSCode decided that should be the default behavior, while other editors (intellij) ask if you want to add newly created files to version control
That’s how git works. Every file and subfolder under the repo’s root folder belongs to the repo.
What does
git add xxxdo then
I just hate the vscode source control. It has always felt clunky and like it breaks things (or i just never figured out the workflow - either way i dont need it lol) It is way clearer to see what is happening the console
That’s what happens when people stumble across that website called GitHub, get hooked and now have unrealistic expectations for the real git.
“I just installed Git for Windows. Where is the drag-to-upload box?”
— A statement dreamt up by the utterly deranged
Real git involves a lot of sweat, requires you to clean up any mess you make, and communicate with any partners about their preferred techniques instead of rawdogging it and waiting for issues. The pushing and pulling will come naturally but you need to know how and when to release, and be clear about how you wish to commit. Nightly is an option but good luck getting everyone on board. People might judge you for using the word “master” but it should be alright in private.
involves a lot of sweat, requires you to clean up any mess you make, and communicate with any partners about their preferred techniques instead of rawdogging it and waiting for issues. The pushing and pulling will come naturally but you need to know how and when to release, and be clear about how you wish to commit. People might judge you for using the word “master” but it should be alright in private.
Don’t talk about my mom that way
I’m literally a software dev working for a top company and I can barely use git on the CLI. I do all of my version control operations using a GUI, so there’s no sense in gatekeeping any of that. This is true of both my work projects and personal ones. It’s cool if you prefer the CLI, but it is absolutely not a required skill in order to have a successful and meaningful career.
It’s not even about the CLI. it’s about hygiene
I agree that the gatekeeping isn’t a good thing, but you should learn at least the basics of the CLI. It will give you a better understanding of what’s going on behind your GUI and makes troubleshooting and fixing problems a lot easier.
Definitely not required but it is absolutely a skill worth having.
It’s absolutely not a skill worth having. If you ever run into issues and need the CLI, you can always get your knowledge right in that moment. If you already can do everything with your GUI and get the same results, getting the knowledge to do it some other way is just wasted time and duplicate work.
People might judge you for using the word “master” but it should be alright in private.
I snorted. It was my inner 12-year-old’s fault. (Also because of recently some idiots getting up in arms about these terms in technology.)
“up in arms”:
Reality:
– “just don’t use them, some people find them offensive”
– “ok”Anonymous techbros online:
“yOu CanT sAY aNYtHiNg ThEsE daYs”
Alright you convinced me its time to pick up this skill. How does one best learn git? Just play around with it and break things?
That’s basically how I did it.
To properly learn it using this method, create a directory that contains only text files and sub directories and treat it like a real project. Add files, delete them, play around with updating the repository. Try and go back a few updates and see how the things react. Since it’s not a real project there’s no risk of loss, but you’ll still get to see the effects of what you do.
that’s a necessary step in your learning process, but certainly not sufficient. I’d recommend reading the book, since it shows in greut detail the inner workings of Git along with the basic concepts :
read the official book : https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2
I fucking HATE when abstractions over git use cutesy names that git doesn’t use.
Backups, backups, backups.
80% of my used storage accross all my drives (theyre a lot of them) is backups 💀
might be a little paranoid…? idk
Like, damn son, at least make a daily archive of your project??
You have to expect things to go wrong, otherwise you have no one but yourself to blame.
If you ever happen to have 5000 uncommitted files, you shouldn’t be asking yourself if you should commit more often. You should be asking yourself how many new repos you should be making.
This is without gitignore, so probably just installed one js dependency
Monorepos are a thing. But obviously this is something entirely different.
The person didn’t have any git repository; probably a new programmer that didn’t know how version control works and just clicked discard without understanding what that means in this situation.
This person is why we have that meme where devs would rather struggle for a week than spend a few hours reading the documentation.
Just curious, git doesn’t touch untracked files though?
‘git reset’ won’t. ‘git clean’, on the other hand, most certainly does. Even then you have to --force it by default, to prevent an accidental clean.
Thanks, didn’t know!
git cleandoes. Turns out VSCode did a clean with that GUI option at that time, not sure of current behaviour.
I’m sure that the “three months of work” was completely shit code. Anybody who is unfamiliar with source control (or even backups!) is prone to making stupid mistakes. Republican voters are likely to have a similar experience over the next 4 years.
It does warn you it will erase the file when you discard…
In reality, VSCode has local file history called “Timeline”. It’s enabled by default.
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-docs/blob/vnext/release-notes/v1_66.md#local-history
In reality, that was added four and a half years after this issue was opened.
Oh, didn’t notice this was a 7 year old issue.
Understandable; no time to check details when your fuse is that short
Take my upvote. Seems like he wasn’t the only one in this thread with a short fuse 😁
I meant it in a completely light-hearted way, but I do wonder if some of the downvoters don’t realize I’m talking about the username.
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Skill issue
I don’t know anything about programming, i came here from /all, but it seems to me that a command that’s this permanently destructive warrants a second confirmation dialog message reminding the user that the files will be permanently deleted and not undoable
Here is the exact warning that a user had to click through in order to get to where they got:
Hm ok yeah, that seems quite scary sounding so that i would strongly hesitate before clicking on “discard ALL changes”. Still, I wonder if a second confirmation dialog with more information is warranted for a command that’s so destructive.
I wouldn’t assume “discard changes” means “delete files that existed before the editor did”.
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discarding changes does not discard uncommitted new files. The VS Code button did a
git cleanwhich is completely unexpected. Git even refers to a git clean with completely different terminology.git reset -> “Resets the index and working tree. Any changes to tracked files in the working tree since are discarded.”
git clean -> “Cleans the working tree by recursively removing files that are not under version control, starting from the current directory.”. This command also requires you to specify a force option to actually do something, else it quits with an error.
Note that git clean never once refers to discarding anything, and git reset never refers to removing untracked files. VS Code was doing an idiotic thing. Running
git reset --hardANDgit clean. There is absolutely no reason to be runninggit cleanfrom an UI button ever. If you want to remove a file you can explicitly remove it.Imagine that the button said “Discard all changes” and then it ran
rm -rf --no-preserve-root /*. Would that make sense as a button? No. It definitely would not.or like “unmount d:” but instead it formats d:
Which is exactly the situation the dude was in. As a newbie, it’s an easy mistake to make. Telling somebody who doesn’t know “well, would you look at that, you didn’t know!” is not just unhelpful, it’s useless and condescending.
It’s changes from the prior commit in the repository, which, if they had not committed anything prior, would have been an empty directory.
This is perhaps a good lesson in teaching version control as its own concept rather than “streamlining it” by bundling it with an editor.
You shouldn’t be taking ownership of files and then deleting them without communication a hell of a lot better than that.
I understand what happened. I’m saying that if you’re going to delete stuff that was there before the software was, your flow to adding a project should include suggesting a base level commit of everything that’s there already.
That’s definitely fair, creating a repository in a non-empty directory could definitely suggest auto-committing the current state if it doesn’t already. I don’t use VSCode so I wouldn’t know.
Although now that I think about it, that could have been the intention here but not automatic, if that’s why 5k+ files were staged without the user explicitly staging them. Extra tragic if that’s the case.
Ok then, the changes to the repository shouldve been discarded. Anything he uploaded shouldve been deleted from the server. Why were files on his local machine deleted?
The repository in Git isn’t on the server, it’s on your local machine.
What makes you think a server was involved here? It was a local repository, evidenced by the reporter’s bewilderment that files can be deleted without going to the Recycle Bin first. Which tells us that in addition to VCS, they were unfamiliar with Windows as well.
It’s not that. It means discard all changes made after the last change committed to this local repository.
In this case it seems like it also performed a
git cleanand deleted his untracked files too. Someone actually opened a an issue to try and prevent the behaviour in the future
I guess cancelling would go back to the “Then you want to commit all files?” dialog, which the user didn’t want to, he just wanted to cancel whatever the IDE was trying to start.
That’s not a very good dialog box. He didn’t make any changes, so discarding them doesn’t sound like a problem.
There should be a notice when you enable source control that this will permanently delete all existing files with a checkbox (checked by default) that says “Add existing files to source control.”
He wouldn’t have seen the “Discard Changes” button at all if source control wasn’t already setup (and detected by VSCode).No sane program will delete files when you initialize source control either.As I found later, VSCode did have weird behaviors with source control back then. My experience is more with the latest versions.
My sibling ran into this issue once. I’m not sure if it’s a setting or a default, but vscode would assume they were working in a blank repo until they made a commit.
Sounds like this person had the project (without source control) in another IDE, tried out VSCode, and it assumed that it was all ‘changes’. I don’t use VSCode, do I can’t say for certain, but I know my sibling lost ~4 hours of project set up for the same reason (though they immediately realized it was their fault).
Reading your comment and #32459, I realize that VSCode source control did have some major issues back then.
It looks like they have improved though, as the latest VSCode I use doesn’t auto-initialize repositories anymore.
They clicked discard changes, confirmed it, and the computer did as instructed. This operation is normally not so destructive as it only discards uncommitted changes to realign the local directory with the remote server. Unfortunately for user, it sounds like they have never committed a change, so realignment meant reverting to an empty folder.
The problem is that these are “source control basics” that everyone needs to learn the hard way once it seems.
Waiting 3 months in between commits however is a really bad rookie mistake because you were worried about making a commit that wasn’t perfect.
the problem is that VS Code ran
git cleanif you clicked yes, which is completely idiotic behavior. No other git client, text editor, or IDE on the planet does that.Either way, waiting 3 months worth of work before a commit is the big mistake here.
I think they hadn’t ever used git before, and according to at least one person in the linked issue, vs code might have auto initialized the git repository for the user.
In fairness, ALL git terms feel backwards at first.
Imperfect commits never existed when you squash.
Squash ftw. Simpler clearer history.
Interesting. I wouldn’t know, because I code everything perfectly the first time.
Disclaimer: The above flagrant lie was brought to you by my also using rebase and squash to hide all of my mistakes.
I think it’s important to know that this program is for code developers, and the issue here is with a tool called git. Git is like file saving on steroids, because on top of saving a single file, you save many changes to files in git, add a comment for why you made those changes, and share your changes across dozens of files with other developers.
What this guy did was develop for many months after starting to use git, but he never actually committed the files. Then he asked for to reset everything back to the original state, something that I do multiple times a day, and it gave him a warning that original means original and you will lose everything. And he said do it anyways.
No he asked for a discard after importing the project into VS Code. discard in git terms refers to
git reset, notgit clean. Even if he wanted to run agit resetthen this version of VS Code would have run agit cleanand deleted everything. Imagine he committed all 5000 files, but had a secret.json that he hadn’t committed. He didn’t add it to gitignore either. Running agit reset --hardwill not delete this file, but the VS Code button did exactly that because it ran agit clean.
Perhaps. Still I am not sure why someone who is not aware of this would be using VSC. If they are a student then what kind of project are they working on that they have so many files?
I’m sure 99% of the files were node modules. The npm bloat is real.
That is wild.
Doing a
git cleanis a dick move.Yeah, real developers do
git clean -dxf.The user clicked an option to “discard” all changes. They then got a very clear pop-up saying that this is destructive and cannot be undone (there’s a screenshot in the thread).
I very much understand how one can think this would revert any changes done to files under version control but not delete the ones that are not. I believe this dialog has since been updated to explicitly state that fact.
Yes, the dialog was changed, as part of this linked issue (and maybe again after that; this whole incident is very old). After reading some of the comments on that issue, I agree with the reasoning with some of the commenters that it would be less surprising for that menu option to behave like
git reset --hardand not delete tracked files.
