Why does git stash create two commits?

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git stash makes two commits, one that has no changes from the base, and one to stash your changes in. Why?

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In message <4F26DF7B.7050109@ubuntu.com>, Phillip Susi writes:

    git stash makes two commits, one that has no changes from the base,
    and one to stash your changes in.  Why?

git-stash can make up to three commits:

working directory (of files git knows about) index working directory (of files git does not know about)

The third commit only appears if you use --all or --include-untracked.

Most likely you do not use -u/-a and your index has not been touched yet, so you only see two commits, of which one is empty.

					-Seth Robertson

Phillip Susi <psusi@ubuntu.com> writes:

The only reason the former is identical to the base is because you are not incrementally building your next commit using "git add". It represents the state of your index. The latter represents the state of the tracked files in your working tree.