A friend of mine, Kurt Schrader, recently posted The Power of Git: git-stash. I haven't gotten a chance to use git, but I am planning to give it a shot in the near future. However, I don't expect to being using git for daily development any time soon.
I've definitely needed a git-stash in the past. It's helpful for fixing a bug without committing your current changes, but it's also helpful if I ever get to work and I end up on a pairing station that has someone else's uncommitted changes.
In those cases I create a patch, revert the changes and move on.
In case you're unfamiliar with this type of thing, here's all you'll need to do (assuming you have patch available).
Creating the patch:
svn diff > patch_name.patchnote: You'll want to add any new files before creating the patch, if you want them included in the patch.
Once you've created the patch you can revert everything and start fresh (
svn revert -R . will recursively revert). You may also need to delete any new files that were created as part of the uncommitted changes (Paul Gross has a one liner for removing uncommitted files).When you are ready to get your changes back you'll need to apply the patch that was previously created.
Applying a patch:
patch -p0 < patch_name.patchThat's basically it for decent stash capabilities with Subversion, but there is one gotcha: patch will not capture Subversion metadata changes. Usually this isn't a problem, but it's always a good idea to look out for this situation when you create a patch.
Jay, if you're interested in learning git but are stuck with using Subversion, take a look at git-svn if you haven't already. My workplace has already migrated to git save for one project, which has to remain as Subversion due to an external developer. In-house though, we use git-svn to work with the codebase, and haven't encountered any problems so far.
ReplyDeleteI've found myself doing this, more or less, for some time.
ReplyDeleteThe only thing I haven't figured out is a good place to store them.
I don't like to leave them in the checkout, because they'll appear in 'svn st'. I don't really want to put them anywhere else though, because I'd likely forget about the patch.
@technicalpickles - perhaps create a patches folder, and set svn to ignore it.
ReplyDeleteJay: svk, if you are stuck on svn at work and not looking to deal with git-svn? The you can quick branch locally, which is sorta what git-stash is doing.
ReplyDelete@technicalpickles - add *.patch to your global/user svn ignore (~/.subversion/config)
Even easier, and it does preserve metadata changes:
ReplyDelete> cd ..
> cp -R myproj myproj2
> cd myproj2
> svn revert -R .
make make changes and commit
Suppose your changes will conflict with your previously created patch.
ReplyDeleteWhat do you do in this case?
I wrote some simple shell scripts to automate this for me, since I find myself doing it often (and thought git stash was useful).
ReplyDeletehttp://www.blisted.org/blog/bin/svn/stash
It behaves similarly to git stash, and creates stashes by creating patches and disintegrating/reintegrating them into the working copy.