[git] git stash blunder: git stash pop and ended up with merge conflicts

Note that Git 2.5 (Q2 2015) a future Git might try to make that scenario impossible.

See commit ed178ef by Jeff King (peff), 22 Apr 2015.
(Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit 05c3967, 19 May 2015)

Note: This has been reverted. See below.

stash: require a clean index to apply/pop

Problem

If you have staged contents in your index and run "stash apply/pop", we may hit a conflict and put new entries into the index.
Recovering to your original state is difficult at that point, because tools like "git reset --keep" will blow away anything staged.

In other words:

"git stash pop/apply" forgot to make sure that not just the working tree is clean but also the index is clean.
The latter is important as a stash application can conflict and the index will be used for conflict resolution.

Solution

We can make this safer by refusing to apply when there are staged changes.

That means if there were merges before because of applying a stash on modified files (added but not committed), now they would not be any merges because the stash apply/pop would stop immediately with:

Cannot apply stash: Your index contains uncommitted changes.

Forcing you to commit the changes means that, in case of merges, you can easily restore the initial state( before git stash apply/pop) with a git reset --hard.


See commit 1937610 (15 Jun 2015), and commit ed178ef (22 Apr 2015) by Jeff King (peff).
(Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit bfb539b, 24 Jun 2015)

That commit was an attempt to improve the safety of applying a stash, because the application process may create conflicted index entries, after which it is hard to restore the original index state.

Unfortunately, this hurts some common workflows around "git stash -k", like:

git add -p       ;# (1) stage set of proposed changes
git stash -k     ;# (2) get rid of everything else
make test        ;# (3) make sure proposal is reasonable
git stash apply  ;# (4) restore original working tree

If you "git commit" between steps (3) and (4), then this just works. However, if these steps are part of a pre-commit hook, you don't have that opportunity (you have to restore the original state regardless of whether the tests passed or failed).

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