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Comment by gtsteve | Hacker News Reader

I personally only use stashes when I've given up on my current approach and want to reset but I might change my mind later (rarely happens). I don't think they're appropriate for stuff you want to keep across branches, there's no real visibility and they'd be easily forgotten.

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I use them to stash changes to config files that remain fairly stable across branches but require local paths, etc. I realize this isn't a best practice for config files but it is what I need to do for my particular mountain of technical debt. This works particularly well since the config files rarely change in a permanent way. I will only do it short term, though. For me, Stash is a tool I use sparingly as a convenience.

> I use them to stash changes to config files that remain fairly stable across branches but require local paths, etc.

I had to resort to git's assume-unchanged[O] to keep these changes out of commits made in the heat of battle.

> this isn't a best practice for config files

Have had great results (in dotnet land) with MS' Secrets Manager[1].

[0] https://www.git-scm.com/docs/git-update-index [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/security/app-se...

Thanks, I will review that. We are working on ASP.NET stuff and using Web.configs in a non-standard way (don't get me started) to store encrypted strings for... anyway, you get the idea. This is in the queue to get overhauled soon, so hopefully won't be an issue much longer (if you squint, you can see the end of the todo list wayyy back there). Maybe I should check this out.

I don't think there's anything wrong with stashes, but there's another interesting trick that you might want to try for this purpose: commit the dead-end, then immediately make a revert commit. You can even add a rationale in the revert commit message.

The technique is not applicable all the time, but for those instances when you really think it's valuable to preserve the knowledge that was gained in trying and abandoning a particular approach it's great.

Same for me. I only ever use stash in cases where I don't materially care if I never see the content again, as with an experimental approach.

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