Re: [PATCH 3/3] stash: require a clean index to apply

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

So I am trying to figure out what the use case here is. Clearly the
above is a toy case, but why is "stash -k" followed by a quick pop
useful in general? Certainly I use "stash" (without "-k") and a quick
pop all the time, and I think that is what stash was designed for.

The best use case I can think of is Jonathan's original: to see only the
staged content in the working tree, and then restore the original state.
But stash does not currently work very well for that, as shown above.

The canonical use case for "stash -k" is to see only the content to
be committed (for testing), commit it after testing and then pop on
top of the committed result, which is the same as what you saw in
the working tree and the index when you did "stash -k".  I do not
think "stash -k && stash pop" was in the design parameter when "-k"
was added (as you demonstrated, it would not fundamentally work
reliably depending on the differences between HEAD-Index-Worktree).