Re: [PATCH] stash: --keep option just saves

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:
> This one, the "snapshot", and various other related topics, are quite
> different.  The workflow the --keep (and for that matter, "snapshot")
> would support I can think of does not sound a very good one we would want
> to recommend (--untracked is a different issue; I haven't formed an
> opinion).
>
> You build on a branch, but you are forever in the state of indecision, and
> instead of committing, you keep saying "save --keep" number of times to
> leave a checkpoint on your stash.  After number of iterations, you may
> have many stashes in "git stash list", but what you can do with them is
> "git reset --hard && git stash apply stash@{$n}" to go back to any of the
> state, but that is about it.

Yeah, but that's a pretty useful thing.

I often save checkpoints of my working state before starting a
tentative/intrusive series of edits -- if they are clearly just part
of a larger logical change, I may not want to make separate commits
[or perhaps more commonly, I'm not entirely sure what the final commit
will be like, and am still "exploring"].

Of course this can also be done in git by doing temporary commits
(to be changed later with --amend, or rolled back before making the
real commit), or whatever, but I think pretty much every usage of
git-stash can be done fairly easily via some other means in git;
git-stash is really just a convenience.

-miles

-- 
Politeness, n. The most acceptable hypocrisy.