Ignore on commit

Hello gitters,

One of the very (very) few features I miss in svn is "ignore on commit" (or, more generally, changelists). I'm not sure if this has been discussed in the past - google failed me a bit due to spurious matches - but I personally find it quite useful. The feature is described here [1] (and graphically, here [2]).

The gist of it is, one can mark certain files as "ignore on commit" and they get placed on a "special list" which shows up on status. These lists are effectively a sub-division of modified (but not staged). Up till now I have found the staging area to be quite sufficient, but recently I hit a use case where I was modifying a large number of files; some modifications were hacks required to get the build to work but were not meant to ever get checked in, most other files had real work. In cases like this its really useful to mark the hacked files as "ignore on commit", so that a) we don't lose track of them (as one would with git ignore, or with [4]) but b) we won't check them in by mistake.

I found some tips on how to survive without change lists ([3], [4]) but they are a bit more cumbersome. Has this feature been discussed?

Thanks a lot for an amazing piece of software, and thanks for your time.

Cheers

Marco