Re: [PATCH 2/2] git-gc: skip stashes when expiring reflogs

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jun 13, 2008, 09:10 UTC
Message-ID: <20080613091040.GB4474@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <bd6139dc0806130156o747fc128hbe28440ed4d228d4@mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 10:56:56AM +0200, Sverre Rabbelier wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> > So of course my first question is "then why didn't you use a branch?" :)
> 
> Because nobody / not everybody has perfect foresight, sometimes you
> don't know in advance that what you thought was going to be a
> temporary stash will turn into a long lived stash. What you are saying
> is that really you should always create a branch, just in case your
> temporary stash proved to be more long-lived than thought?

Well, two things here:

  1. I was being somewhat tounge in cheek with that comment. If you read
     the rest of the email, I was trying to figure out reasons why
     people are using "git stash" for long-term storage, to see if we
     could improve the branch interface or find a middle ground between
     temporary stashes and branches.

  2. You don't need perfect foresight. Sometime in the thirty days (but
     probably about 5 minutes later) you realize "oh, this is some
     stashed work that I'm not going to deal with for a while" and you
     promote it to a topic branch.

     But then, I have good reason to want works-in-progress to become
     topic branches: I can then push them to a location which is backed
     up, and from which I can retrieve them if I want to access them
     from a different machine. Not everybody uses the same workflow.
     If you don't see any other benefits to topic branches, then the
     promotion is just a pain.

-Peff