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gitgit-loggit-stash

What are those 'WIP' and 'index' commits that appear after stashing?

When I run git lg on my local development branch, the latest commit is shown as below:

* 7d21213 - (1 hours ago) update business rules - developer1 (HEAD, origin/develop, origin/HEAD, develop)

However, if I stash local changes by running git stash and then run git lg, I get the following:

*  at12334 - (13 seconds ago) WIP on develop: 7d21213 update business rules - developer1 (refs/stash)
|\
| * ef9a11b - (14 seconds ago) index on develop: 7d21213 update business rules - developer1
|/
* 7d21213 - (1 hours ago) update business rules - developer1 (HEAD, origin/develop, origin/HEAD, develop)

What does this mean? It seems that two new commits (labelled index and WIP) are created after stashing. Is that the case, and, if so, what is the logic behind such commits?

Note

git lg

is an alias already defined in the test environment as

git log --graph --abbrev-commit --decorate --date=relative --format=format:'%C(bold blue)%h%C(reset) - %C(bold green)(%ar)%C(reset) %C(white)%s%C(reset) %C(dim white)' --all
Solution

  • git lg? What git lg?

    Be aware that lg is not a native Git verb. True, many people use an alias called lg that usually corresponds to

    git log --all --oneline --graph --decorate

    This definition seems to be the one you're using, here. However, aliases are local; what git lg means in your config may be different to what it means in Bob and Alice's configs.

    Therefore, you should always include the definition of a relevant alias in your question, so we (Stack Overflow users) can be on the same page as you, and know exactly what happens when you run

    git <alias>

    (git lg, here).

    What the mysterious objects are

    This is explained in the Discussion section of the git-stash man page:

    A stash is represented as a commit whose tree records the state of the working directory, and its first parent is the commit at HEAD when the stash was created. The tree of the second parent records the state of the index when the stash is made, and it is made a child of the HEAD commit. The ancestry graph looks like this:

           .----W
      /    /
-----H----I

    where H is the HEAD commit, I is a commit that records the state of the index, and W is a commit that records the state of the working tree.

    In your case,

    • the object whose short SHA is ef9a11b corresponds to the state of your index (I on the graph above),
    • the object whose short SHA is at12334 corresponds to the state of your working directory (W on the graph above).

    Those two objects (W and I) don't normally get listed in the output of git log, but they do if you use the --all flag.