Re: Behaviour of 'git stash show' when a stash has untracked files

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Sep 24, 2017, 00:41 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqing9hqro.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <20170921033152.4hbkctzxraww5rqo@sigill.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

Show 8 quoted lines

> I think it would mostly Just Work for your case. git-apply should ignore
> the subject cruft at the top of the patch. And if you didn't create a
> stash with "-u" or with bits in the index, then those would be absent
> from the diff.
>
> And if you _did_ create such a stash, I actually suspect that "apply"
> barfing on the resulting patch may be a better outcome than silently
> ignoring the changes.

OK, that sounds sensible.

Show 5 quoted lines

> I dunno. I do not use either of those features ("-u" or stashing the
> index state) myself. But I have always been bothered how the saved state
> is a bit hidden from the user. It seems like a recipe for user confusion
> when they save something with "git stash" but then "stash show" doesn't
> even mention it.

Yes, I do not dispute that the issue needs to be addressed. What I was unsure was how (e.g. should that be given always? does the user ask and if so how? what the output to tell the information looks like?)

> Those all seem like sane interface proposals. As I said above, I have a
> vague feeling that the default _ought_ to tell about everything.

OK.

> I guess the nuclear option there is introducing "git stash info" or
> something, and marking "git stash show" as an alias for "git stash info
> --worktree". It is too bad, though, as "show" is really the perfect
> name.

I think the end result of that becomes the same as adding "git stash info" an alias for "git stash show --all" on top of what I wrote.

I suspect nobody uses "stash show" in a script in such a way that its output is consumed by the script logic, so it may probably be OK to show everything by default (which I agree is the way we would have done _if_ people demanded on day 1 that we need to record all three variants; IIRC, in the early days of the command back when the "show" subcommand appeared, even "--index" was merely an intellectual curiosity and was not a serious feature, and from that point of view the historical output we currently have made sense).