Dear maintainers,
Am 20.04.25 um 23:05 schrieb Junio C Hamano:
Markus Raab <mailinglists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
To "fix" your shell script (make the files get lost), git stash pop
should be inserted before the last line:
----
#!/bin/sh
git init-db --object-format=sha256
git commit --allow-empty -m +
oid=$(git rev-parse HEAD)
echo a > a
echo b > b
git add a b # some arbitrary files with content
git stash
git cherry-pick $oid
git stash pop
git cherry-pick --abort
----
So, this is not limited to stash at all.
Yes, it is just how I ran into it. It is neither limited to stash nor
cherry-pick --abort.
When you start "cherry-pick", which cannot complete without your
help (most often, this happens when the cherry-picked change
conflicts with what you have in the current commit), the command
stops and gives control back.
This is fine and expected.
At that point, it is up to you to do anything to bring your index
into a shape that you desire the "cherry-picked" commit to have.
You'd do so by editing working tree files (often with conflicts),
creating new files, removing unneeded files, etc., and then updating
your index with these changes, and then "cherry-pick --continue" to
conclude.
Or, after mucking your working tree and index to "correct" the
stalled "cherry-pick", you may decide that it is not a good idea to
cherry-pick the commit after all. You say "cherry-pick --abort" and
you expect your index to be clean relative to HEAD, and working tree
files also adjusted for it.
What I additionally would have hoped for (hence this bug report) was
some way to undo the "cherry-pick --abort". A "help for undoing" would
actually be helpful for many other operations, too.
Actually, I later on found how to undo it, so you might also consider to
do nothing here.
But if you want to become even more user friendly, you could also
consider to print a message which would help the user to recover the
state/files which might have been lost accidentally.
E.g. "git rebase" could print which sha256 was the HEAD before rebase
and "cherry-pick --abort" could print how to recover the added files
that were reset etc.
Or an alternative approach would be some "git recover-recent-files",
"git recover-recent-commits" etc. commands so that the user does not
have to fiddle manually in .git/objects. Similar to the "go back in
time" feature in vim (which I rarely use, though).
Instead of doing "git stash pop" there, you could have added
arbitrary files with content, or edited working tree files, or
any other changes manually, and "cherry-pick --abort" would have
removed such changes to your index and your working tree files, just
the same way.
Yes, it is the same and I agree the main problem was in the front of the
keyboard. But things like this happen ;)
"git stash pop" will remove the stash entry after updating your
index and your working tree files, and unless you save them away
elsewhere, if you make further changes to these files, there is no
easy way to get that exact change you took out of the stash entry
back.
Yes, so you could take my story as hint to improve the "undo-ability" of
git in such scenarios.
So one lesson we can learn from this episode is
Never use "git stash pop" WHEN IT IS POSSIBLE YOU MAY LATER
CHANGE YOUR MIND. "pop" applies and then drops the stash entry,
so what you will have in your index and working tree will become
the ONLY copy of the change you previously stashed.
Yeah, thanks to clearly state it.
Of course, you need to remember at some point to drop the entry you
no longer need with "git stash drop" if you take that approach.
Exactly, also a failed "git stash pop" won't get removed, so there
easily accumulate "forgotten" things in git stashes. But much better to
have a bit less tidiness then lost files after "git gc". So I think the
behavior of "git stash pop" itself actually has good "undo-ability".
--
Best regards,
Markus Raab
