Bug when stashing previously-ignored file plus associated .gitignore change

[Sam Partington <sam@whiteoctober.co.uk>]

Hi there,

I'm running git 2.7.4 on Ubuntu 16.04.  I've found a couple of
problems when "un-ignoring" files in tandem with git stash.

Here's how to reproduce:

Say you have a project using git, with a .gitignore file which
contains the following line:

bin/*

You can then see the problems by doing this:

$ touch bin/mynewfile # this file will be ignored at this point

and then updating .gitignore to look like this (adding that second line):

bin/*
!bin/mynewfile

So far, so good; the new file is no longer ignored.

But now, try stashing the changes and including untracked files in the stash:

$ git stash save -u

Here's the first problem, bin/mynewfile is still there:

$ ls bin/mynewfile
bin/mynewfile

But you'd expect it to not be there and be in the stash, I think.
This is what would normally happen with the untracked-files option for
git stash.

This leads to the second problem - you can't now pop the stash:

$ git stash pop
bin/mynewfile already exists, no checkout
Could not restore untracked files from stash

If you want to apply the stash, you have to remove the file:

$ rm bin/mynewfile
$ git stash pop # this works, and re-creates bin/mynewfile

This is quite an unusual edge case, but I have hit it two or three
times now and so thought it worth reporting, but I'll understand if
it's deemed not worth fixing!

Do let me know if you need any more information from me here.

Thanks
Sam

PS Sorry for the lack of formatting - I'm sending this as plain text
as my original HTML emails was rejected as possible spam by your
mailserver.

Sam Partington
Senior Developer

www.whiteoctober.co.uk
Office: +44 (0)1865 920 707

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