git-stash vs. git-branch

Question

In a previous Git question, Daniel Benamy was talking about a workflow in Git:

I was working on master and committed some stuff and then decided I wanted

Answer 1

I'm always wary of git stash. If you stash a few times, things tend to get messy. git stash list will display a numbered list of stashes you created, with messages if you provided them... But the problem lies in the fact that you can't clean up stashes except with a brutal git stash clear (which removes them all). So unless you're always consistently giving super-descriptive messages for your stashes (kinda goes against stash's philosophy), you end up with an incomprehensible bunch of stashes.

The only way I know of to figure out which one's which is to use gitk --all and spot the stashes. At least this lets you see what commit the stash was created on, as well as the diff of everything included in that stash.

Note that I'm using git 1.5.4.3, and I think 1.6 adds git stash pop, which I guess would apply the selected stash and remove it from the list. Which seems a lot cleaner.

For now, I always try to branch unless I'm absolutely positive I'm gonna get back to that stash in the same day, even within the hour.