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Comment by wldlyinaccurate | Hacker News Reader

I hardly use stash any more. If I need to "stash" something, I just commit it. The reason this is okay is because we work on very small branches, with the aim of squashing everything into a single commit before merging it with master. So it doesn't matter if I commit half-baked code to my branch, since it's going to be squashed anyway.

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I find that scenario makes me use stash much more - I usually have several branches on the go, so I can sometimes make changes while on the wrong one, at which point I'll stash and switch to the correct branch.

Huh. It's worth noting that you don't have to have a clean branch before you switch to another. You'll automatically shunt the changes to the new branch when you switch.

I've often had the workflow of "make a bunch of changes on master; git checkout -b new_feature_branch; git commit -am 'save it off'; git checkout master".

I haven't looked into the plumbing that goes into that, but I suspect it's actually stashing and popping for you.

Yeah, most of the time that works fine, but if my version of the branch I'm switching onto is behind then switching can induce "fake" conflicts; it's easier (I find) to just be in the habit of always stashing.

This is only true if one of the files that you've changed has 100% no changes between the branch you're currently on and the branch you're switching to. Even stuff that would normally be auto-merged will not allow you to switch branches.

I still usually give it a try, and then stash when that gives me a problem. With 12 developers and some high-churn files, it's pretty common that 2 people are doing something with the same file, even with branches that only last 1-2 days.

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