Re: git-stash: RFC: Adopt the default behavior to other commands

From: Wincent Colaiuta <win@wincent.com>
Date: Dec 21, 2007, 07:59 UTC
Message-ID: <56CA16B8-705C-45E5-8BBA-18E7072F2EC6@wincent.com>
In-Reply-To: <7v4pedov6c.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>

El 20/12/2007, a las 23:31, Junio C Hamano escribió:

Show 13 quoted lines

> しらいしななこ  <nanako3@bluebottle.com> writes:
>
>> How about making this behavior configurable?
>
> First, as a general principle, I'd like to avoid having commands that
> changes their behaviour drastically depending on who the user is.  It
> makes it harder for people experienced a bit more than totally new to
> help others.  If they are truly experts and are familiar about the
> configuration stash.quick, then they will be fine, but others would  
> say
> "Well, it works for me -- 'git stash' itself won't stash but list.   
> Why
> isn't it working for you, I don't know" and scratch head.

Although the patch is well-intentioned, I totally agree with Junio on this point.

The solution here isn't configuration, but education. Some people have already told how they've been burnt by doing an accidental stash, but how many times does this have to happen to you before you learn your lesson? Once? Twice if you are very unlucky?

And this is not a very painful lesson to learn, seeing as "git stash" is not an inherently destructive operation. In 99% of cases there is no risk of hard-to-reverse "damage". If you accidentally stash, you can just unstash with "git stash apply". I already posted a two-line patch which tells the user how to do this:

http://marc.info/?l=git&m=119799257404542&w=2

The 1% of cases in which "git stash apply" won't work is where the user has unsaved changes in running editors at the time they do the accidental stash. IMO, this is no justification to change the behaviour of stash. Exactly the same is true of other commands that alter the working tree; for example, what happens if you use "git checkout" to switch to another branch when you have unsaved changes in running editors? Are people suggesting that we should change the behaviour of "git checkout" to warn the user that they should save any unsaved changes before continuing and then hit "y"? I think that such a thing would be absurd.

Cheers, Wincent