Feature Request: Capability to save and load the workspace

I'm not sure whether such a feature exists or not. But let me explain my concern.

Say, we have different profiles for different products. When I work on a profile (edit, configure, build etc.) I can't switch to another profile before I distclean the existing one. So, when I have to work on 2 projects at the same time, I have to have 2 copies of the same source tree. This might be OK for 2, but if the repository is around 3 gigs this is not quite suitable for more than 2 profiles.

IT WOULD BE NICE to have a feature in git that allows us to save the current workspace then work on a different profile on a clean environment. Then save that profile and switch back to the previous profile at any time without losing the environment.

Currently, I'm doing this myself using some scripts like:

work on foo

$ ./project-save foo work on bar $ ./project-save bar $ ./project-load foo keep working on foo etc.

where, project-save looks like:
1. BRANCH=<current branch>
2. echo $BRANCH > .BRANCH
3. git checkout -q -b foo
4. git add -f .
5. git commit -q -m 'Save foo'
6. git checkout -q $BRANCH

This simply forks a new branch 'foo' then adds/commits all untracked + gitignore'd files to 'foo'. In addition, it stores the current branch name in a temporary file (.BRANCH). (All binary files and even temporary file are committed.)

and, project-load looks like:
1. git checkout -q -f foo -- .BRANCH
2. BRANCH=`cat .BRANCH`
3. git checkout -q -f $BRANCH
4. git checkout -q -f foo -- .
5. git reset -q
6. rm -f .BRANCH

This gets the target branch name from the file .BRANCH in 'foo', switches to that branch and checks out all files from 'foo'. At the end it removes .BRANCH file.

If I want to completely remove the project foo, then I simply remove the branch 'foo'. ---

The problem is that this works way too slow  :-(  (this has some other
problems as well). I believe, such a feature could be implemented more
efficiently in the core, but I'm so familiar with core git.
 

What do you think?

Yakup

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 10:45 AM, Yakup Akbay<yakbay@ubicom.com> wrote:

Did you have a look at the stash command yet? I might be missing something, but it looks to me like it's exactly what you're looking for...

AFAIK, git-stash does not save untracked and ignored files. What I need is to save them, too.

But yes, git-stash could be a good candidate for this.

Yakup

-----Original Message-----
From: Erik Faye-Lund [mailto:kusmabite@googlemail.com] 
Sent: Freitag, 31. Juli 2009 12:10
To: Yakup Akbay
Cc: git@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Feature Request: Capability to save and load the workspace

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 10:45 AM, Yakup Akbay<yakbay@ubicom.com> wrote:

Did you have a look at the stash command yet? I might be missing something, but it looks to me like it's exactly what you're looking for...

Hi,

On Fri, 31 Jul 2009, Yakup Akbay wrote:

So...  "git add . && git stash"  You can even make an alias.

Ciao, Dscho

"Yakup Akbay" <yakbay@ubicom.com> writes:

See http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/109103 for a discussion around the same idea.

Yakup Akbay <yakbay@ubicom.com> writes:

First, if the problem is repository size, you can use git-new-workdir script from contrib/ to have multiple checkouts for a single repository (but each checkout better be on different branch).

As to "save current state": take a look at 'git stash' command, which saves state of working directory (and index).