Re: git stash data loss

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 09:29:53AM -0400, Jeff King wrote:

> If we put actual files inside "x", which git does track, then they would
> be part of the stash, and should be properly retained. But they're not:
> 
>   $ rm x && mkdir x && echo foo >x/file
> 
> Now we have some precious contents in the form of "x/file". They are
> untracked by git, but git should be careful about removing them.
> 
>   $ git stash
>   Saved working directory and index state WIP on master: 2d32d3a initial
>   HEAD is now at 2d32d3a initial
>   $ ls -l x
>   -rw-r--r-- 1 peff peff 0 Jul 27 09:19 x
>   $ git stash show --raw
>   :100644 000000 e69de29... 0000000... D  x
> 
> Now this _is_ data loss. Stash blows away untracked files inside the
> directory, but does not record them in the resulting stash. And that
> should be fixed.

Hrm. The problem is that after creating the stash, we then run "git
reset --hard" to drop the changes that we just stashed. But that is not
always accurate. It will not usually touch untracked files, but it might
if they have D/F conflicts with tracked files. So we need to replace
that "git reset --hard" with some safer command that will notice we are
about to overwrite untracked files. But I am not sure what that command
would be.

-Peff