Re: [BUG] git stash refuses to save after "add -N"

On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 03:34:45PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Hmm. Thinking about it a bit more, I think "add as empty content" is probably the best. It scares me a little because it is losing information during the stash, but consider it from the user's perspective.

Their work-in-progress is being interrupted, so they need to stash. They try "git stash" and the current version comes back with an error. Now what? If they know what to do, they can manually "git rm --cached" each of the offending files (and I say manually because there isn't a parseable list of them anywhere). But they probably don't know what to do, which means trying to find the information in the documentation.

And all of this while they are trying to quickly switch contexts to whatever it was that caused them to stash in the first place. So I expect the most useful thing would be a "git stash -f" that adds them as empty. And it's reasonably safe, because we're not losing information in the transition from index to stash tree without the user first having been notified.

On the other hand, it may be sufficient to just do the transformation with a "-f", which will save users even more time, and we can put a note in the documentation about how stash interacts with -N. I don't know whether people will actually care or not (and your patch already does the unconditional form, so it's less work :) ).

-Peff