How to keep uncommitted work in a git clone

[Mojca Miklavec]

On 5 November 2016 at 08:39, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> On Nov 4, 2016, at 12:39 AM, David Bariod wrote:
>
>> Personnally, I would just commit such change. It is cheap, can be reworked later and be ketp safe in a private remote repository in case of disaster.
>> With git there are no reason to not commit event not ready yet change set.
>
> Coming from a Subversion background, where you commit when you are finished with your work and not before, this reversal is very difficult for me to grasp.
>
> I don't know how to rework a commit later.
>
> I don't know how to, let's say, commit my unfinished work on curl, then make changes to libpng and commit them, and then push only the finished libpng commit and not the unfinished curl commit to upstream.

# create a new branch for temporary work on curl
git checkout -b playing-with-curl
# same as:
# git branch playing-with-curl && git checkout playing-with-curl

#add temporary changes
git add net/curl/Portfile
git commit
<enter the commit message>

# you could (optionally) do your libpng-related work in a branch as well
# users without commit rights or any developer wanting to submit a pull request
# for review before committing have to do this anyway;
# you you do this in master
git checkout -b fix-for-libpng
# add and commit changes
git add graphics/libpng/Portfile
git add graphics/libpng/file/the-patch-you-just-added.diff
# review changes
git diff --cached
git commit
<enter the commit message>

# go to master and pull the latest changes
git checkout master
git pull --rebase

# if you did your work on libpng in master, you are then set

# else go to your libpng branch and rebase the changes on top of the
latest master
git rebase master
# I don't want to give wrong instructions here, but I suspect that even
# "git push origin master" works in this case


Then, when you want to resume your work on curl:

git checkout playing-with-curl
<do your stuff>
git add net/curl/Portfile
git commit
<do more stuff>
git add net/curl/files/some-fix.patch
git commit

# at any point you can also do
git rebase master

Now you have three or more commits. Check with "git log". You can
merge them with

git rebase -i HEAD~3

This will open a new editor and you have to replace "pick" with "squash". See
    http://gitready.com/advanced/2009/02/10/squashing-commits-with-rebase.html
or google for other examples.

Mojca