Re: Stashing untracked files

From: Steffen Prohaska <prohaska@zib.de>
Date: Sep 30, 2007, 08:41 UTC
Message-ID: <E505AC4A-FDCB-4D9D-9CF7-C68CBC20BFFD@zib.de>
In-Reply-To: <46FF1F1E.2050000@theory.org>

On Sep 30, 2007, at 5:59 AM, Neil Macneale wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> git stash is an acknowledgment that not everything needs to be  
> committed, and sometimes working source trees are messy. Prior to  
> the stash command, I just accepted that I'd need to commit  
> everything and do  some maintenance to un-commit those changes.  
> stash is awesome for me and the realities of the way I need to  
> work. IMHO, it would be the best thing since sliced bread if it  
> handled untracked files.

I agree, it could be a great tool. Even only to make me feel better before running 'git clean' on a larger source tree when I was to lazy to scan 'git clean -n' in detail.

BTW, I don't have results of the builds in my work tree but keep them in a separate directory. Nearly everything in the work tree is 'real' source code, maybe cluttered with some backups or tmp files.

> If this is really just a problem for me, I can write a shell script  
> to do the dirty work. I just wonder if it is a common enough use  
> case that it merits support in the tool itself.

I think it would be useful. Here is a problem I ran into last week:

A merge failed because it wanted to add a file not tracked by the current branch. At first I didn't fully appreciate this fact and thought that 'git stash' could help. But to do so, it would need to store the _untracked_ file and remove it from the work tree. This would allow the merge to succeed. Current stash didn't really help.

	Steffen