Re: [RFC] git stash: add porcelain for sharing stashes through remotes

From: Hanan Arshad <hananarshad619@gmail.com>
Date: Oct 7, 2026, 06:31 UTC
Message-ID: <20261007063155.4573-1-hananarshad619@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqzewsmaod.fsf@gitster.g>

> All of the three you listed (discovery, transfer, clean-up) become
> easier to work with if you used branches, branches have always had
> good support for these three (and other) operations, and I do not
> see a good reason to add a parallel support to do something similar.

I understand the concern. I think I did not explain the workflow that originally motivated the RFC clearly enough.

The idea came from a workflow I used with Perforce shelves. One concrete case is build configuration. The repository contains configuration templates, while I may have several local configuration variants that should not become part of the normal project history.

A tester may need to apply the same configuration while testing different branches or revisions, for example:

    branch A       + configuration X
    branch B       + configuration X
    release branch + configuration X

Using a branch for configuration X makes it another line of history based on some revision. When the code being tested changes, that configuration then has to be merged, rebased, cherry-picked, or otherwise combined with the revision being tested.

What I want instead is an overlay: the tester chooses the code revision and the temporary configuration independently, applies the configuration for the test, and then discards it.

Perforce shelves give this kind of temporary handoff a straightforward user-facing workflow. Git already has the underlying functionality as well; that became clearer to me during this discussion. A stash can already be pushed as a ref, so I agree that adding a separate "publish" command would not be justified.

My motivation for the RFC is therefore not to add another transport or storage mechanism. It is to see whether the existing stash/ref functionality could have a more coherent UX for this kind of temporary handoff, instead of requiring users to compose the generic ref, push/fetch, and stash operations themselves.

This configuration-overlay workflow is one concrete use case that motivated the idea. There may be other temporary handoff use cases, but I do not want to rely on hypothetical cases to justify it.

Thanks, Hanan