Feature Request: Capability to save and load the workspace

[Yakup Akbay <yakbay@ubicom.com>]

I'm not sure whether such a feature exists or not. But let me explain my
concern.

Say, we have different profiles for different products. When I work on a
profile (edit, configure, build etc.) I can't switch to another profile
before I distclean the existing one. So, when I have to work on 2
projects at the same time, I have to have 2 copies of the same source
tree. This might be OK for 2, but if the repository is around 3 gigs
this is not quite suitable for more than 2 profiles.

IT WOULD BE NICE to have a feature in git that allows us to save the
current workspace then work on a different profile on a clean
environment. Then save that profile and switch back to the previous
profile at any time without losing the environment.

Currently, I'm doing this myself using some scripts like:


work on foo

$ ./project-save foo
work on bar
$ ./project-save bar
$ ./project-load foo
keep working on foo
etc.


where, project-save looks like:
1. BRANCH=<current branch>
2. echo $BRANCH > .BRANCH
3. git checkout -q -b foo
4. git add -f .
5. git commit -q -m 'Save foo'
6. git checkout -q $BRANCH

This simply forks a new branch 'foo' then adds/commits all untracked +
gitignore'd files to 'foo'. In addition, it stores the current branch
name in a temporary file (.BRANCH). (All binary files and even temporary
file are committed.)


and, project-load looks like:
1. git checkout -q -f foo -- .BRANCH
2. BRANCH=`cat .BRANCH`
3. git checkout -q -f $BRANCH
4. git checkout -q -f foo -- .
5. git reset -q
6. rm -f .BRANCH

This gets the target branch name from the file .BRANCH in 'foo',
switches to that branch and checks out all files from 'foo'. At the end
it removes .BRANCH file. 

If I want to completely remove the project foo, then I simply remove the
branch 'foo'.
---

The problem is that this works way too slow  :-(  (this has some other
problems as well). I believe, such a feature could be implemented more
efficiently in the core, but I'm so familiar with core git.
 

What do you think?

Yakup