Leftover bits

While developing for Git, sometimes I find a topic getting "stuck" for various reasons, e.g. the basic direction is good, but the remainder of the system is not ready for such a change.

Instead of running "git branch -D topic" in such a case, I use a "git hold" alias that looks like this:

[alias]
  hold = "!sh -c 'git update-ref refs/hold/$1 refs/heads/$1 && \
          git branch -D $1' -"

to stash it away. And "git for-each-ref refs/hold/" gives me many such "held" topics.

Of course, without an active effort to go back, reconsider and prune from time to time, these things tend to accumulate. And today was a good day to review them for me. I found a couple of topics that may still be viable as my reward:

• [DONE - will be in Git 2.0] Make "git add " notice removals of files in the named directories; after all "add" is not about "add files to git", but is "add the current state to the index", and the lack of files that previously existed is part of that state.
  Cf. $gmane/171811
  
  
• [DONE] Allow "git log .." to mean "Give me a log of recent commits that touch my parent directory and what are under it". The current code instead insists that ".." could be both a revision range and a path and asks the user to disambiguate.
  Cf. $gmane/172619

I did not find major downsides on either of these topics after re-thinking the issues, and I didn't see any valid objections from people whose judgement I trust in the old discussions, either.

Perhaps I should try resurrecting them and see what happens.