git reprex ?

[moodymudskipper]

Discussed today with @krlmlr

• Git in theory should relieve us from the anxiety of creating a mess, because we can always go back
• In practice however it's common to be very afraid of making a mess with git (you start a merge/rebase you don't know how to abort it or if it's done or not etc, you're afraid that you lost or messed with the stash...)

A git reprex is basically just a copy of a repo, in a temp (default) or chosen location, with (if technically possible) the pushing to the remote is disabled. I can do whatever I want in this repo and it won't affect my project, so I can test my rebase skills there, or pull and deal with conflicts without freaking out.

Fancier would be to be able to squash some commits, remove some branches, to make the reprex simpler (without having a trace of those operations in the original or new repo). This takes us closer to a "minimal" reprex but I'm not sure what the api would be.