Re: [CLOSED] git checkout <branch> allowed with uncommitted changes

Carlos Martín Nieto <cmn <at> elego.de> writes:

That's a very good point, if it was actually documented at all that that's what it meant; and / or presented some warning that "BTW, if you edit this file again now, it'll screw up your whole tree" instead of an innocuous "M"; and didn't appear to contradict what the manpage says about "local modifications", we could probably have avoided half of this confusion. :P As it was, when I saw that M suddenly appear after several days of bouncing between branches without it and with everything working, I just thought "oh great, git's managed to break this tree", because I remembered the same thing from the previous trial run.

That there IS an indication though might just be enough for me to be able to deal with it. Realistically, switching branches with uncommitted changes (unless you're doing it because you've ALREADY screwed up and are changing the wrong branch) is basically a trainwreck waiting to happen.

git stash appears to be useless for any nontrivial change on the *other* branch, since there's no indication when you return to the stashed branch there's a stash sitting around, which is not something you're going to remember the next morning if fixing the master took the rest of the day, and you're not going to use "stash list" by then either.

But as long as you get the "warning", an alias that does a "commit -am 'temp commit to avoid git breaking the tree'" is something I think I can probably live with.

Thanks for all the help guys - very much appreciated. As far as I'm concerned, this topic's done.

(Though if someone can come up with a script / hook / whatever that improves the "visibility" of stash, that would be awesome. Or one that makes the refusal to switch branches consistent).

Looking at the manpage for checkout in the hope that there might be a "--safe"
switch, I don't understand why
  "-f  Proceed even if the index *or the working tree* differs from HEAD."
even exists, since it proceeds under those conditions anyway.
"--safe" appears to be exactly what the behavior should be if you DON'T
specify -f, except that -f nukes the working tree outright rather than just
bleeding it across. Hopefully it'll be clearer after some sleep.  :)