Hi Thomas, On Wed, 6 Feb 2019, Thomas Gummerer wrote: > I think the idea here could definitely be split into a couple different > phases, that could be individually useful, and can be merged > individually, though I don't know if they would necessarily be. Good idea. > Of the top of my head: > > - write test_expect_failure tests for the expected new behaviour > > This may not be worth including in git.git yet, but it can be a > very useful starting point for somebody else continuing the feature > if the student finds they don't have time for it. I like this approach. > - implement pushing the index state, without dealing with conflicts > - implement poping the index state, without dealing with conflicts > > This can already be individually useful, and I think this is > something people asked for on the mailing list, though I didn't try > digging up old threads for now. After these two steps stashing and > restoring a merge conflict would still not work, but we have a good > first step that could be merged. We already have `git stash --keep-index`. Is this what you mean here? > - implement pushing/poping conflicted state > > This would obviously be the end goal. On second thought, this might actually be super trivial. Right now, we support two modes (not counting the `--untracked` stuff): --keep-index and --no-keep-index. In both cases, we seem to create a merge commit whose tree reflects the working directory and whose first parent is HEAD and whose second parent is a single commit on top of HEAD (which contains either no changes in the case of --no-keep-index, or whose tree reflects the index in case of --keep-index). To extend that to the conflict case, we could introduce a new flag --with-conflicts, and have the commit structure Worktree | \ | index stage 0 | / | \ | stage 1 stage 2 stage 3 | / / / HEAD --------------- The only tricky thing I can see is to maintain backwards compatibility if possible, so that old `git stash` will do something at least semi-sensible with those commit structures. It might be too small a project, after all. Ciao, Dscho > > Another potential issue is that a new feature might be prone to naming > > or user interface discussions which could last for a long time or > > could not result in clear decisions. > > Yes, this is definitely a potential pitfall. I haven't thought in > depth about the interface yet, but I think the discussion around that > would be something we as mentors could and should guide the student > through. We also wouldn't make the feature the default from the > beginning, but introduce it behind a new flag/maybe a config option, > to make sure we don't introduce any backwards compatible changes. > > It's probably also something the student should include in their > proposal, so we can get eyes on it early in the process. > > > So I think we should be very careful if we propose a project that > > implements a new feature to a student. We should at least consider the > > above potential issues and see if they can be mitigated before the > > project starts. > > Thanks for bringing these issues up, they are definitely useful to > work through. > > > Thank you anyway for proposing this idea, > > Christian. >
