Re: Usability of git stash

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Oct 20, 2008, 05:29 UTC
Message-ID: <7vmygz4yws.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20081020003644.GA10412@coredump.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

Show 11 quoted lines

>   git checkout next ;# which is where I usually am anyway
>   hack hack hack
>   # oops, I have been building this directly on top of next and it
>   # really needs to be a feature-branch on maint
>   git stash
>   git checkout -b jk/maint-fix-whatever origin/maint
>   git stash apply
>
> The equivalent non-stash commands would be "commit -m wip" and
> "cherry-pick". But the stash saves me the trouble later of having to
> delete the wip cruft on top of next.

The equivalent would be:

	git checkout -m -b jk/maint-fix-whatever origin/maint

no need for stash, wip-commit, nor cherry-pick.

The advantage of using "stash then stash apply" (not "stash pop") or "wip-commit with cherry-pick" is that you can reset, take a deep breath, and redo it, when the resulting merge conflict gets too hairy.

> I disagree. I think the strength of stash is that it is divorced from
> the history. So it is more like a cherry-pick (or diff | apply, which is
> what it was intended to replace).

I agree with you; it really is the "diff saved somewhere, later applied".