Subject: Re: Usability of git stash

From: Andreas Ericsson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2008 11:49:35 +0200

Anders Melchiorsen wrote:
> Brandon Casey <[email-masked]> writes:
> 
>> In exchange for allowing new users to stub their toe on new commands, the
>> work flow of more experienced users is made a little easier.
> 
> I wonder whether experienced users even use stash a lot. Personally,
> after getting my head around the DAG, and thus getting more
> comfortable with git reset, I tend to make "WIP" commits instead.
> 

I use stash quite a lot. It's useful for me because my co-workers
sometimes pull from me so I cannot use 'wip' commits (without annoying
my co-workers anyway).

> After having used "git stash clear" at a bad time once, I am wary of
> stashing work that I actually want to keep. I prefer workflows where
> my mistakes can be (easily) corrected.
> 

I never use "stash clear", but always do "stash pop", so my stash-stack
is hardly ever deeper than one. It would be a lot worse for us to get a
"wip" commit accidentally propagated and built on further. It's happened
and it's no fun what so ever as it requires team coordination and rewrite
of published history to get it back to a good state.

> 
> The primary thing that stash does for me is preserve the index state.
> Unfortunately, --index is not default for stash apply, so I often
> forget it.
> 

I commit regularly enough that it doesn't take me long at all to re-do
the index changes.

> Sometimes, I also want stash to store away changes to untracked files
> (to get a clean working directory), but that is not possible.
> 

git add .
git stash --index

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   [email-masked]
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231