On Fri, Mar 17, 2017 at 2:23 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > We've discussed the lack of "untracked but precious" class a few > times on the list in the past, but I do not recall the topic came up > in the recent past. It perhaps is because nobody found that class > useful enough so far. My gut reaction on reading the bug report was that the root cause is git-checkout doing the wrong thing by default. (cf. Git-Merge-2017, "What’s Wrong With Git?", I am not sure if the video is yet available) One argument in that talk was that Git promises to do "work on multiple branches in parallel (context-switched, single threaded)", and git-checkout is the apparent command to switch to another context (branch). However by putting away only tracked content, we miss doing a proper context switch for untracked and ignored files. That partial switch has advantages in the typical use case, e.g. * compiled objects in the worktree may not need to be recompiled. * no need to do work for the untracked files (e.g. move to a special location). Both these reasons argue for performance, instead of "correctness" in the sense of "easy-to-understand commands for top level principles". And in that talk the presenter concluded that git-stash was only invented to circumvent these "correctness" problems, such that if git-checkout were to also (de)populate the untracked and ignored files on branch switch we would not need git-stash, because git-checkout did it for you already. And by the omission of git-stash and an apparent easier-to-understand git-checkout the whole git suite would become easier for users. I further conclude that when git-checkout were to behave "correct" as outlined above, then this class of bug reports would not occur. Just food for thought. Thanks, Stefan