Ask HN: Poll: Do you git stash your WIP? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Poll: Do you git stash your WIP?

3 pointstedmiston6 comments

For the unfamiliar, git stash [0] is a solution to a problem like this:

You're working on a feature, and suddenly realize the need to switch gears to work on something else — say a prod hotfix — and you need to store your WIP somewhere, but you're not ready to commit. You run `git stash` with an optional commit message and get back to business.

What happens for me is I end up making many small stashes across many projects. It might be a trivial change or a prototype of an idea, sometimes I forget creating them in the first place and implement the same thing again and/or they become stale.

My question for others is:

Do you use git stash? Do you forget them sometimes some?

For some more context: I'm pondering writing a little program to peruse all stashes from all repos on your drive in one place.

[0]: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-stash

I don't understand "not ready to commit"; what's the issue with interim commits? If you're working under a new branch, which you should be anyway, there's no harm, unless you squash them under inappropriate circumstances.

My thought is that these WIP comments remain in the log once a branch is merged into master (shared with the team) and it feels like a messy paper trail.

I am personally a fan of commit squashing, particularly small feature branches and/or when the commits in question are temporary like this. I try to leave a really clean commit log on each branch I work on knowing that it will be merged eventually. Sometimes I'll interactive rebase or rewrite history on these to make it that way.

Not everyone believes in that approach though.

I use SmartGit, and it already shows a list of my stashes for any open repo (including the branch, the date, and the message on the stash, which functions as a name to remember what the contents are).

Only if I stash pop in a few minutes time (stash, quick fix another branch, stash pop) . Mostly commit, or move to new clone

git stash && git pull --rebase && git stash pop

gwip

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