Re: Individual file snapshots

From: Brian Gernhardt <benji@silverinsanity.com>
Date: Feb 12, 2010, 22:32 UTC
Message-ID: <C022F034-F60E-4E89-A174-DC0F53ADEC19@silverinsanity.com>
In-Reply-To: <ron1-62D136.13570812022010@news.gmane.org>

On Feb 12, 2010, at 4:57 PM, Ron Garret wrote:

> That would require a separate branch for every snapshot, no?  I want 
> this to be lightweight.  It's not so much the creation of a zillion 
> branches that bothers me, but having to come up with a new name every 
> time would be a real hassle.

Ahhhh...  You could just use the stash and use some kind of recognizable message: git stash Failed: fooed the bar badly

Or you could make a stash-like snapshot branch?  The following sequence does something like that:

  git add .
  git commit -m "Ooops"
  git branch -f
  git reset --hard HEAD^

After a few failures like that, you can look over all the snapshots with

  git log -g snapshots

By default they will be kept around for 30 days, or the current setting of gc.reflogexpireunreachable.  If you want to keep a snapshot around for more than 30 days, you probably want to give it a real branch anyway.

You could either create a script that uses the above commands or a patch that makes git-stash take a --ref= argument and then set:

  alias.snapshot = stash --ref=refs/snapshots

~~ Brian