How to emulate 'git stash' in fossil, bzr?

Question

Is it possible to emulate the behavior of 'git stash' when using fossil/bzr?

Basically I'm interested in handling the following workflow:

• at some point the source code tree has state X, it is commited
• I proceed to writing new code, I write it for a while and I see the opportunity of a refactoring
• I can't commit at this point, because the change I've started to make is not completed, it is not atomic yet
• at this point I would do 'git stash', would save the current work and would get back to state X
• I would do the refactoring and commit, source code now has state Y
• I would merge source code in state Y with code in stash, complete the change to make it atomic, then commit once again, pushing the source code to state Z

I think that generally it is possible to emulate this scenario when using another SCM by branching the code in state X instead of doing 'git stash', doing the refactoring in that branch, then merging the branch back into the main one. But I'm aware that branching is not always a cheap operation. So are there any better particular approaches that eventually rely on specific features of fossil/bzr?

Answer 1

Use bzr shelve and bzr unshelve commands.

Answer 2

You can use the patch command of your system.

• First you make a "stash" by storing a generated diff as .patch file:

  $scmtool diff > working.patch

• then reset your working directory.

• later, apply the patch with:

  patch -p1 --dry-run < working.patch

• and then this works, remove the --dry-run to apply the patch for real.

Answer 3

The stash command was implemented in fossil recently. You got to check out latest fossil executable you will see stash in the available command list.

Here is the link to the web help on its syntax.