Question

Often while working on a branch I need to introduce some “temporary” changes (such as additional debugging info, or a change which lets me better observe the thing i’m actually working on).

About these “temporary” changes:

• I want them in my working copy of my branch, because they help me to work on the actual change,
• I don’t want them committed to the branch, because the branch is going to be merged into master some time and they’re not production code.

Currently I just keep them as unstaged and I skip them manually when staging every commit. However I can’t stay with this solution because:

• All the time I have to remember which files I need to skip,
• Someday I’m going to end up with 2 changes in one file, one being temporary, one to be committed, and it’s going to be really troublesome.

How should I deal with it?

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gitignore is obviously out of the question because I don’t want to ignore the whole files and I’m still interested in changes from other committers (I need to rebase the branch to master from time to time).

Answer 1

I typically deal with this by using:

git add -p

… to stage changes hunk-by-hunk. Then you just have to make sure to press n for your debugging changes.

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If I have more involved changes of this type, I’ll create a branch called something like local-changes with a commit at its tip that introduces the debugging code. After creating a few more commits, I’d then use:

git rebase -i master

… to reorder them so that the commit with the local changes is at the tip again. Then to update master and return to the local changes branch, you can do:

git checkout master
git merge local-changes^
git checkout local-changes