Re: [PATCH] Clarification for the command "git checkout <branch>"

[Michael Witten <mfwitten@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 11:36, Avery Pennarun <apenwarr@gmail.com> wrote
> On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 6:11 AM, Markus Elfring <Markus.Elfring@web.de> wrote:
>>> You may want retry the command after recording the local changes
>>> (1) in a temporary commit on the current branch,
>>
>> Can commits be consistently marked for intermediate use?
>> Can such "special" commits be easily found later on?
>
> You just make the commit with a 'FIXME' type commit message, then 'git
> commit --amend' to fix it when you come back later.

Something more explicit might be useful in my opinion, as suggested in
this previous post:

    http://marc.info/?l=git&m=126768880311121&w=2

    > I'm not sure how often WIP commits become
    > accidentally published or left in the history,
    > but perhaps it would be advantageous to
    > provide a means of specifying officially that
    > a particular commit is in fact a WIP commit
    > such that no other commits can be made on top
    > of this WIP commit and it can't be merged with
    > other branches or pushed or whatever.

>>> or (2) by using "git stash".
>>
>> Is this storage operation supported per branch?
>> Does a checkout look if any files were stashed away for the specified branch before?

Markus, this was discussed ad nauseum in the other thread:

    http://marc.info/?l=git&m=126746296820948&w=2

    http://marc.info/?l=git&m=126749413508313&w=2

    http://marc.info/?l=git&m=126746730431007&w=2

Are you not reading? Are you not comprehending? Are you trolling?

> stashing isn't really something you'd want to do on a per-branch
> basis.  Most of the point is that you stash away your changes, then
> switch to another branch, then restore your stash to your *current*
> working state sometime later.

As you may know, "git checkout" carries local modifications to the new
working tree if there are no conflicts, so no explicit stash usage is
necessary in many cases.

Anyway, I think it would be useful to be able to manage multiple
stashes rather than having to rely on just one global stash. However,
I imagine than explicit Work In Progress (WIP) commits as sketched
above would go a long way in keeping histories and workflows clean and
organized.