Re: Requesting `git stash --cached` or something similar

Trevor:

On Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 9:44 PM, Trevor Saunders [off-list ref] wrote:

I would expect the answers to be it sets the working directories state
to the state in HEAD, and leaves untracked files alone.  If that's what
you want you can do git commit -m <message>; git reset --hard; git reset
--soft; git stash save to get the effect you want I believe. That said
it seems like a kind of odd thing to want to do, what are you actually
trying to do?

That looks like a bad solution. git reset --hard is going to throw
away any remaining changes to the working tree. The previous commit
would have committed the staged changes, albeit, you should connect
the commands with && instead of ; to account for errors. After a `git
reset --hard' there's no point in doing a `git reset --soft' because
hard does *everything*. --soft would try to reset the HEAD without
touching the index or working tree, but both have already been reset
with --hard.

The motivation is most likely stashing a few changes away so that you
can commit others that are ready to be committed while keeping others
around to continue working on them. This too is a good observation. It
could mean that the OP is inexperienced with a commit-often workflow.
You can use git -add -i or -p to commit the good stuff and keep the
bad stuff out to work on it more. The great thing about Git is that
the history is very malleable. You can also commit the bad and fix it
after, rebase the history to clean it up, and end up with perfect
history while still keeping your changes safely in history.

The OP should experiment with workflows because Git is already very
good at this. Stash isn't really needed. That said, I had forgotten
that --patch was added to stash some time ago so if that is what you
want then it already exists. It's not quite as easy as --cached, but
it still gives you some control. It's still not nearly as good as
using the full power of Git with a regular commit on a branch though.

Regards,

-- 
Brandon McCaig [off-list ref] [off-list ref]
Castopulence Software <https://www.castopulence.org/>
Blog <http://www.bambams.ca/>
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