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Comment by maccard | Hacker News Reader

Perforrce handles this with shelving; it's a great feature and one I wish was better supported by other VCS'es

The only difference between a shelveset and a WIP branch is that shelving happens after the work, and creating a WIP branch happens before (or at least before the first commit).

Then there's everything that branching can do, that shelves cannot. For example: history, and undoing your mistakes/experiments. Shelvesets contain no history, and tacking dates/numbers after the name is exactly the problem that VCS sets out to solve. To name one example.

Shelvesets are a hack/kludge.

I'm a strong advocate of commit early, commit often, but not everything fits neatly into a 20 line change, particularly on a legacy c++ codebase. Shelving lets me pause and resume with a backup at the end of the day.

> history, and undoing your mistakes/experiments.

I don't need history or undoing mistakes when I'm shelving, I need a quick server side backup to show someone else something, or to "save" my work at the end of the day when it's going to run on 30 minutes into the next day.

Branches may be superior, but a kitchen knife is superior to a pocket knife, yet I don't pull out my 8 inch steel knife to open an Amazon parcel .

Shelving is closer to git stash than WIP branches, though. No history etc.

Shelves are server side though vs stash. I really don’t understand why stash can’t just support server side.

As the other poster replied, server side is one of the most important parts of shelving.

...but perforce getso many other things wrong....

So so many...

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