How do you deal with incomplete commits?

[Thomas Baumgart]

Hi Thomas,

On Samstag, 31. Oktober 2020 13:39:04 CET Thomas Friedrichsmeier wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> may I pick your brains for this question that keeps coming up for me?
> 
> Say I'm working on a feature in branch A. I have some changes in my
> working copy that are so half-baked that I don't want them to end up in
> the commit history as such, but I don't want to throw them away, either.

I assume, you don't thing about pushing those at all.

> Now I want to switch to branch B for something unrelated. What do I do
> with my changes? How do you folks deal with this?
> 
> 1) Stash my changes, then switch. Works, but the stash is something
> that I tend to forget about, when going back, and this method get
> messy, quickly, when dealing with several branches at once.
> 
> 2) Commit the changes, anyway, but marked as "WIP" or similar, and use
> commit --amend, when coming back. However, it wouldn't be the first
> time that I forgot to amend, after all, and pushed my WIP-commits.
> 
> 2a) I could use a "work/" branch, which would at least give me a chance
> to correct this after pushing. I'd still have to remember to do so,
> before merging my work into a regular branch, though.
> 
> 2b) What I'd really like to see is a commit keyword that would make git
> throw an error, if I try to commit something on top of it, thus forcing
> me to use commit --amend.
> 
> 2c) Alternatively, do we have a keyword that would prevent a commit
> from being pushed (or from being merged to something that is not a
> "work/" branch)? That would not be as nice as 2b, IMO, but it would
> still catch my usual mistakes.
> 
> Any other solution that I am missing? Do we have something along the
> lines of 2c (not according to our docs, AFAICS)?

You can use interactive rebase of those unpushed commits so that the ones
belonging to each other form a single one (so to say post commit --amend).
I sometimes do that to cleanup the history (when I forgot to --amend).

-- 

Regards

Thomas Baumgart

https://www.signal.org/       Signal, the better WhatsApp
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