RE: [feature suggestion] Add 'git stash export', 'git stash import' commands to allow to backup stash externally

From: Randall S. Becker <rsbecker@nexbridge.com>
Date: May 5, 2021, 20:07 UTC
Message-ID: <000401d741ea$5227c610$f6775230$@nexbridge.com>
In-Reply-To: <d8aef355-0718-8b3d-7e9f-614673dd250f@rawbw.com>

On May 5, 2021 3:52 PM, Yuri wrote:

Show 14 quoted lines

>Subject: [feature suggestion] Add 'git stash export', 'git stash import' commands
>to allow to backup stash externally
>
>I work in a very large repository, but all of it except for my stashed items can be
>re-downloaded from the remote URL.
>
>
>Stash though is much smaller in size and is especially valuable. Its
>loss would be very expensive.
>
>
>Could you please consider adding 'git stash export', 'git stash import'
>commands so that in case of an accidental repository loss stash can be
>imported from the external backup?

I would like to suggest another option: Teach clone and fetch to transfer stash commits. They are filtered out normally. It might be straightforward to preserve the stashed commits. A mirror approach is probably not appropriate since that needs the repo to be bare and Yuri's situation is unlikely to support that. So something like --include-stashes, which would be off by default.

As a side potential defect/bug, if you fetch refs/stash, git is happy to comply and reports the HEAD update and then loses it. git show-refs does not show the stash. What I saw on the fetch was (I only had untracked files in my stash to make things more painful) as follows in 2.29.1:

$ git fetch origin refs/stash
From /path-to-repo
 * branch              refs/stash -> FETCH_HEAD

-Randall