[clug] "git" hints?

[Alex Satrapa]

Say I'm working on some test-driven development. Let's also say that I  
want the policy for the project to be that all commits to the "main"  
repository must pass all tests.

So locally, I write a test, which I expect to write code to support.  
Now I have a test that fails. This can't go to the main repository,  
and I don't necessarily want to leave this committed to my repository  
since I know the guy next to me has been fetching every change I make  
like there's no tomorrow and he'll run the tests and spend hours  
trying to figure out what broke when it's simply the case that the  
test appeared before any code existed to make it pass.

While I'm trying to implement the (extremely complex) code that causes  
that test to pass, I happen to find an interesting article on Django  
unit testing that suggests using a different test framework. So for a  
moment, I want to save the code I'm working on which doesn't quite  
make the test pass, but I'm sure I'm almost there. I want to be able  
to get rid of both the test I wrote and the primordial class + methods  
that exist so far - they don't work, and I just want to stash them  
away somewhere to come back to later. I don't want to lose them forever.

Here's one thing I could do:

git commit -m "Implementation in progress"
    -> commit d3adb33f
git checkout HEAD^ .             # rewind to before the changes I just  
saved
git checkout -b FancyNewFeature  # switch to a new branch for fiddling

This means that my commit d3adb33f is still in the repository and I  
can return to it at any time, so my work is not lost:

git checkout master

... but I'm sure there's a better way. Any suggestions?

Also, how much trouble am I going to get myself into with this shell  
function:

   switch () {
      if [ -z "$1" ]
      then
         git branch
      else
         git checkout $1
      fi
   }

This is used thus:

   [alex at here]% switch
    FancyNewFeature
   *master

   [alex at here]% switch FancyNewFeature
   Switched to branch "FancyNewFeature"

Alex